Estimate: $40000/60000
This portrait, which was shown at
the Sargent Loan Exhibition at Copley Hall in Boston 1899 will be included
in the forthcoming Volume II of the catalogue raisonné by Richard
Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray in collaboration with Warren Adelson and Elizabeth
Oustinoff. It has descended in the family of the sitter and has never before
been offered for sale publicly. According to the entry in regard to the
portrait of Mrs. Benjamin Kissam in Volume I of the catalogue raisonné,
Sargent painted several members of the the sitter's immediate and extended
family including "Mr. Kissam's wife, Marie-Louise, wife of W. H. Vanderbilt
(no. 211), the latter's daughter, Mrs. E. F. Shephard and her daughter
Alice (no. 209), George Vanderbilt himself (Biltmore House) and several
other Vanderbilt connections."
In 1929, the sitter's son-in-law,
Arthur Train, wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly titled "The Portrait
That Sargent Forgot" in which he describes the painting with great insight
and accuracy as follows:
"It is a brilliant full-face portrait
of a slight, pink and white old gentleman with soft white hair and beard
and flowing white moustache. He wears a a dark-colored business suit that
merges into a background of indefinite bronze-green. An impression of punctilious
neatness is conveyed by the turn-down collar, the soft bowtie, the pearl
stud, and the white handkerchief which protrudes from the pcoket of the
sack coat. The face is highly intelligent, the expression at once whimsical,
shrewd, immensely tolerant, but the slanting blue eyes are a little sad
and world-weary...One might say, 'An amiable, perspicacious old gentleman,
who knows a thing or two, has had some hard knocks and survived them, but
whose innate sense of values is too sound to take his own success too highly.
A country lad, perhaps, grown old in city harness, who would like to retire
to the farm and go fishing - sometime.'"
