The present portrait was commissioned from James McNeill Whistler by Edward W. Hooper on June 20, 1890. Hooper, a treasurer of Harvard College and one of the original trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, first met Whistler in London in 1886. During the summer of 1890, he visited Whistler again at his new studio at 21 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and submitted his request for a portrait of his eldest daughter, Ellen Sturgis Hooper: "If it will not bore you to make for me a 'note' of my oldest daughter–a red haired girl about seventeen years old–it will give me great satisfaction to have you do so...I have just come from America, and shall be in London only two weeks more" (Letter from Edward W. Hooper to James McNeill Whistler, June 20, 1890). Ellen sat for Whistler approximately twenty times and had "delightful memories of the sittings, which covered about 60 hours, in June and July" (Letter from Ellen Hooper to F. W. Coburn, April 8, 1946).

According to the scholar John Borden Armstrong, who interviewed the sitter: "[Whistler] was interested in Ellen's copper hair and high coloring. She wore a dress made of material sent her by a cousin in Japan, Dr. W. S. Bigelow. It was Japanese linen with a dark blue folded edging and a blocked overall blue pattern. This was composed of ten characters, repeated, 'which meant', she said to me with a little smile, 'happy old age.' Whistler talked very little during the sittings...gave the impression of intense concentration, and painted on long after the best light was gone" ("Portrait of a Lady: A Recollection of Whistler," Art Journal, vol. XXV, no. 3, Spring 1966, pp. 250-51).