Nonchaloir (Repose)

A young woman has slid down into the corner of a sofa, head tipped back, eyes closed, one hand resting in her lap. She is Rose-Marie Ormond, John Singer Sargent's niece and his favorite model in his later years. He painted her in 1911 wearing a cashmere shawl and a costume dress of silvery satin, one of the theatrical props he kept around the studio. Most of the canvas is given over to that satin, which spills across the seat and pools onto the floor in sweeping, confident strokes. Sargent was essentially painting fabric here and treating the figure almost as part of a still life, with the face left loose and half in shadow.

By this point Sargent had grown thoroughly sick of commissioned portraits, which he once called a "pimp's profession," and he turned to painting family and friends for his own pleasure. The French title means something like nonchalance or idleness, and the lolling pose nods to eighteenth century pictures of aristocratic leisure, though the mood is closer to a hot afternoon when nobody can be bothered to move. The picture carries a sadder weight now: Rose-Marie was killed in 1918 when a German shell struck a Paris church during a Good Friday service. Sargent, who adored her, never quite recovered from the news.