Mrs. Charles Deering (Marion Denison Whipple)
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
1888
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 71.1 × 61 cm (28 × 24 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Anonymous loan
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The sitter was the wife of Charles Deering, Chicago businessman, important benefactor of the Art Institute, and lifelong friend and patron of artist John Singer Sargent. In this half-length portrait, the painter depicted Marion Deering seated with her right arm resting on a chairback, her eyes engaging the viewer. Sargent rendered her face and hand with a high degree of finish, skills he had fine-tuned in the 1870s while a student in Paris. The broader handling of paint in her dress and its lace embellishments signals Sargent’s facility with the tactile and expressive possibilities of paint. Indeed, in the mid-1880s, Sargent not only worked in portraiture, but also experimented with the themes and vocabularies of Impressionism.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
