Portrait of Robert Bacon, 39th Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt

Robert Bacon served as United States Secretary of State from January to March 1909 under President Theodore Roosevelt, a brief tenure bookending the end of Roosevelt's administration. A Harvard graduate, diplomat, and financier with ties to J.P. Morgan, Bacon represented the patrician American political class of the Progressive Era. Sorolla's 1909 portrait was made during his celebrated exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America in New York — a show that drew nearly 160,000 visitors and electrified American collectors with its vivid Spanish luminism. The portrait commissions that followed placed Sorolla in contact with the highest echelons of American public life. The work now hangs in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State, an appropriate permanent home for the likeness of a former chief diplomat. Sorolla's Spanish approach to official portraiture — less rigid than British academic conventions, more direct and light-filled — offered American sitters a distinguished alternative to the formal modes they might otherwise have expected.

For an official portrait destined for a diplomatic setting, Sorolla balanced his instinct for chromatic vivacity against the gravitas expected of a statesman's likeness. The result is characteristically luminous while maintaining the compositional sobriety appropriate to institutional portraiture.