The Misses Hunter

The Misses Hunter of 1902 is an informal group portrait of the Hunter sisters in a domestic setting. Mary Hunter was one of Sargent's closest friends and most important patrons, and her family appeared in several of his works. Unlike his formal commissioned portraits, this group composition allowed compositional invention: the arrangement of multiple figures in an informal interior was the format he used most brilliantly in his earlier masterpieces. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy and later acquired by Tate, where it is among the most popular Sargent holdings.

The multi-figure composition required careful orchestration of the sisters' relationship to each other and to the pictorial space. Sargent's handling of white and cream dress in a light-filled interior — the situation he explored most brilliantly in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose — is here deployed with mature confidence. The different personalities of the sisters are distinguished through pose and expression.