#oil

Apparently the woman sitting here spent decades collecting musical instruments from all over, and thousands of them ended up going to a museum. He was doing a brisk trade in American portraits around this time, presidents included, so from what I can tell this was a commission like any other.

He spent his career on music halls and rented rooms rather than polite society portraits, and the sitter here was apparently a young Belgian woman he painted more than once around that time. There's also a small industry of writers who've tried to pin the Whitechapel murders on him — nothing proved, but the story trails his name around.

He's known for beaches and sunlight, so a hillside of grey-brown rock was a surprise to me. Apparently he worked outdoors fast, getting a whole canvas down in one sitting, and left behind stacks of studies like this alongside the big paid-for pictures.