John Singer Sargent 1856 - 1925

Albert de Belleroche, 1923 (gift from the artist)
Count William de Belleroche, 1944 (his son)
Private Collection, England, 1969
Fine Arts Society, London (sold: Sotheby's, New York, May 24, 2001, lot 33)
Adelson Galleries, New York (acquired at the above sale)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2003

David McKibbin, Sargent's Boston, with an Essay & a Biographical Summary, Boston, Massachusetts, 1956, p. 84
Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography, London, 1957, p. 339
Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, The Early Portraits: Complete Paintings, New Haven, Connecticut, 1998, vol. I, no. 112, pp. 110-11, 248, illustrated

The present work depicts Alice Sidonie Vandenburg, the mother of the Welsh 19th century genre and portrait painter, Albert de Belleroche. Sargent met Belleroche in 1882 and subsequently painted and sketched him on several occasions. According to Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, this portrait "was almost certainly in progress at the same time as Sargent's portrait of Madame X (1883-84, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), with which it shares a number of features: the silhouetted figure, the black gown, with a décolletage, if anything more risqué than that of Madame X, the left hand resting on the hip in a favourite device, the bent-back wrist" (John Singer Sargent, The Early Portraits: Complete Paintings, New Haven, Connecticut, 1998, p. 110-11).