Lady in Green and Gray

Thomas Wilmer Dewing began creating decorative paintings of women in interiors around 1886, using this subject to explore formal qualities of color and composition. Like the painter James McNeill Whistler, he was especially concerned with rendering subtle distinctions of hue and value. Although the sitters in Dewing’s interiors were intended to be anonymous, many of them were recognizable to contemporary viewers as his friends or lovers. The woman depicted in Lady in Green and Gray is Gertrude McNeill, an actress who frequently posed for the artist between 1911 and 1917.