Jeannette Ovington (1863–1926)

George Peter Alexander Healy's portrait of Jeannette Ovington represents the work of the most celebrated American portraitist of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, whose long career took him from Boston to Paris to Rome and back. Healy painted presidents, European monarchs, and the American professional classes with equal facility. A portrait of a twenty-four-year-old woman like Jeannette Ovington was a typical society commission: recording the sitter's likeness for family memory while demonstrating the family's cultivation and social standing.

Healy's technique combines the solid academic tradition he absorbed in Paris with the directness of American portrait practice: the face is the priority, modelled with confident attention to likeness, the costume supporting rather than competing. His handling is accomplished and clear rather than virtuosic in the Sargentian sense.