Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (1828–1887)

Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, painted in 1876, is one of Cabanel's most significant American portraits and documents the Gilded Age patronage networks that brought European academic painters into contact with the new industrial fortunes of the United States. Wolfe was the wealthiest unmarried woman in America at the time of her death, heir to the Lorillard tobacco fortune, and the first female major donor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which she co-founded and to which she bequeathed sixty-three paintings and a substantial endowment. Her decision to commission her portrait from Cabanel — the official painter of Napoleon III's court and the most celebrated academic portraitist in France — was consistent with her role as a major arbiter of American taste in European painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's holding of the portrait places it in the institution she helped create.

Oil on canvas in Cabanel's grand portrait manner, appropriate to a sitter of great wealth and social consequence. The composition likely employs a monumental scale and conventional accessories of elevated portraiture — formal dress, perhaps a draped table or pillar — within a setting that projects dignified authority. Flesh tones are built with Cabanel's characteristic layered glazes, and the costume fabric is handled with the tactile specificity he brought to wealthy female portraiture.