Portrait of Lisa Colt Curtis

A young woman stands full-length in a white dress against the shadowed ground of an interior, her figure caught in a cool, even light. John Singer Sargent painted this portrait of Lisa Colt Curtis, the wife of the financier George Curtis, in 1898, at the summit of his fame as the fashionable portraitist of American and European society. The elegant vertical silhouette, the fluid, confident handling of the white drapery and the understated restraint of the setting are all hallmarks of the mature Sargent at the top of his cosmopolitan career.