Edith Foster Vickers, wife of a newly rich British manufacturer who would number among Sargent’s most important early patrons, is dressed for an evening in the country. An up-to-the-minute bustle and boned bodice ornament her custom-made Aesthetic gown. A stylistic amalgam of the popular late-19th-century conception of earlier English styles, the dress reveals the sitter’s progressive taste and willing collaboration with Sargent on the portrait’s conceptualization. This artful historicism was praised by critics in Paris and London. One went so far as to link Mrs. VIcker’s eerily distinctive appearance to the haunted heroines of Edgar Allan Poe.
Mrs. Albert Vickers is one of four early full-length portraits by Sargent showcasing his updated Old Master style. Its novelty attracted enormous international attention and led sculptor August Rodin to name him “the Van Dyck of our times.”
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