Provenance

• 1883: possibly with Wunderlich's, New York dealers.
• 1888: owned by Thomas Benedict Clarke (1848-1931), New York;
• 1889: bought by Charles K. Miller, Chicago;
• 1906: bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund.

See further details in MacDonald 1995 (cat. rais.) [more] (cat. no. 933).

Exhibitions

• 1889: Second Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1889 (cat. no. 54) as 'Lady in Gray'.

Chicago Tribune, 9 June 1889, commended it:

'Whistler's haughty lady in grey is posing...but she does it with absolute frankness. She is there to be impertinent and no one can be as delightfully impertinent as Whistler ...The little picture has been snapped up of course, and thus our supercilious English girl is destined to frown upon Chicago during the rest of her immortal youth.'