Mrs. Fiske Warren and her Daughter Rachel by Sargent in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010

Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel

1903

John Singer Sargent, American, 1856–1925

Dimensions: 152.4 x 102.55 cm (60 x 40 3/8 in.)

Medium or Technique: Oil on canvas

Classification: Paintings

Accession Number: 64.693

Gretchen Osgood Warren, member of a prominent Boston family and an accomplished poet, posed with her eldest daughter at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court in Boston (now the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), where Sargent had set up a temporary studio. The works of art around the figures, including the intricately carved chairs and a fifteenth-century Madonna and Child (still visible in the Gardner’s Gothic Room), underscore the sitters’ refinement. Sargent emphasized the beauty and elegance of his sitters, positioning them in emulation of the Madonna and Child behind them, but their aloof expressions somewhat contradict their tender pose. Along with his sitters, Sargent’s free, confident, and expert technique is on display: note the silvery brushstrokes on Mrs. Warren’s dress and the thick slash of white, tinged with green, on the arm of the chair. The portrait’s imposing size, the Renaissance furniture, and Mrs. Warren’s formal pose evoke aristocratic portraits of the past. At the same time, Sargent’s loose painterly style is very modern. The composition would seem to illustrate a description of another Sargent portrait written by American critic Charles Caffin: both pictures feature “a lady [in the] full flavor of the modern spirit . . . never exceed[ing] the limits of good taste.” [1]

Margaret (Gretchen) Osgood Warren (1871–1961) was the eldest child of Hamilton Osgood and his wife Margaret Cushing Pearmain. She spent much of her childhood abroad while her father studied surgery in Germany and later worked with Pasteur in France (on their return, Dr. Osgood introduced Pasteur’s rabies antibodies to the United States). Gretchen and her sister were educated in languages, science, art, music, and literature, and scholarly pursuits sustained her for the rest of her life. In Paris she studied singing with Gabriel Fauré and drama with Benoît-Constant Coquelin (both friends of Sargent), although she was not permitted to appear on stage or to sing professionally. In 1891 she married Fiske Warren, the youngest son of Samuel D. Warren (founder of a prosperous paper manufacturing firm). Fiske Warren was an idealist, a supporter of dress reform and the single tax, and an anti-imperialist who garnered public attention for his involvement with the political affairs of the Philippines. He went to Manila in 1901–2 and moved the family to Oxford, England, in 1904–7; upon her return Gretchen Warren was offered, and declined, academic positions at both Wellesley and Radcliffe colleges.

During Sargent’s 1903 visit to the United States, Isabella Stewart Gardner invited him to paint at Fenway Court, the Venetian-style palace she had recently built in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood to house her art collection. Sargent made several portraits in its elaborate Gothic Room, each one reminding the viewers of the friendship between artist and collector, as well as the relationship between the historical masterpieces of the collection and the art of Sargent and his contemporaries. Although Fenway Court had opened to the public in February 1903, the Gothic Room remained off-limits. The room, on the third floor with large windows overlooking the central courtyard, provided an evocative setting for Sargent’s portraits; it was dominated by the artist’s 1888 portrait of Mrs. Gardner and was richly decorated according to her unique sensibilities with paintings, furniture, fabrics, and architectural elements.


The Warrens’ sittings were recorded in a number of photographs (now in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Sargent arranged Mrs. Warren and her daughter in grand Renaissance armchairs, and used an elaborate gilt candelabra and a fifteenth-century polychrome Madonna and Child as a backdrop. This sculpture inspired the unusual pose of mother and daughter: Rachel rests her