About this work
Painted in 1884 in oil on canvas and now held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, this near-life-size portrait commands attention from the first glance. Edith Foster Vickers stands dressed for an evening in the country, her tall, slender figure filling the vertical canvas — measuring a striking 208.3 × 99.1 cm.
A fashionable bustle and boned bodice ornament her custom-made gown, a combination of popular late-19th-century conceptions of earlier English styles that reveals the sitter's progressive taste and her collaboration with the artist.
She stands with her gaze directed past the spectator, dressed in a deep-hued garment of refined simplicity, while in her left hand she holds a stem of white flowers.
The background is somber, focusing all attention on the subject, while light subtly illuminates her figure, emphasizing the texture of the fabric and the delicate details of her features.
Sargent was commissioned to paint this portrait just before his 1884 exhibition of *Madame X*, the work that would soon ignite scandal in Paris.
The piece was commissioned and painted at Lavington Rectory, Petworth, where Sargent had been visiting the Vickers family.
Following the completion of his portrait of the Vickers daughters, Colonel Vickers commissioned portraits of his wife, sons, and eventually Sargent was commissioned to paint thirteen members of the extended Vickers family.
*Mrs. Albert Vickers* is one of four early full-length portraits by Sargent showcasing his updated Old Master style — a novelty that attracted enormous international attention and led sculptor Auguste Rodin to name him "the Van Dyck of our times."
The artful historicism of the portrait was praised by critics in Paris and London, with one going so far as to link Mrs. Vickers's eerily distinctive appearance to the haunted heroines of Edgar Allan Poe.
There is something quietly electric about living with this portrait. The tall, narrow format and the sitter's cool, deflected gaze give the work an aristocratic self-containment — it rewards a hallway, a double-height wall, or any space that can hold a figure of genuine presence. The deep, shadowed palette suits rooms with warm artificial light, where the contrast between darkness and the pale luminosity of the gown and flowers comes alive after dusk. The
