Mrs. Cazalet and Children Edward and Victor

Sargent's 1900 portrait of Mrs. Cazalet with her sons Edward and Victor is one of his accomplished Edwardian family group portraits that balanced the informal and the formal in the manner that distinguished his best portrait commissions. The Cazalets were a prominent English family of Belgian origin who had established themselves in the highest levels of English society and commerce; the portrait represents the family at the threshold of the twentieth century in the mode of Edwardian patrician domestic confidence. The work is now at LACMA, one of several Sargent portraits that reached major American collections through the dispersal of English country house collections in the twentieth century.

The mother-and-two-sons composition employs the informal outdoor or interior setting that Sargent favored for family groups, the figures arranged in a natural-seeming conversation or encounter rather than the formal alignment of official portraiture. The handling is fluid and confident, the relationship between the three figures established through gesture, gaze, and the shared light environment.