This portrait represents John Singer Sargent´s lifelong friend Sarah Sears, a photographer and patron of the arts in Boston. Her alert pose, intense gaze, and upper-body posture contrast with the seemingly relaxed position of her lower body, demonstrating how Sargent seemed to capture, as one critic wrote, "the nervous tension of the age." Sargent´s stunning surface displays of paint connoted elegance and dash, and helped make him the portraitist of choice for the aristocracy of England and America at the turn of the century.
Gift of George R. Brown in honor of his wife, Alice Pratt Brown
