201.9 x 94.8 cm, Watkins' life-size, full-length Marguerite numbers among her most striking and ambitious portraits. The unknown sitter (family tradition has it that she was Watkins' Parisian maid) wears a flowing gown and poses regally before a paneled wall. The wall's rectilinear molding frames her head and upper body, creating the subtle suggestion of a painting within the painting. The simple verticals and horizontals of the molding also offer an effective compositional counterpoint to the figure's softly curving forms. Depictions of refined women in elegant attire were a staple of women artists of the day, and Watkins shows clear mastery of the genre here. She unveiled Marguerite in Philadelphia in 1908 at the 103rd annual exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. [http://collection.chrysler.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/21/title-asc?t:state:flow=7b828a9d-f690-46bc-82e4-0d9e40b63426] Brief Candles: Susan Watkins, the Woman in White. It’s unusual to come across a successful American painter who doesn’t even merit a stub entry in Wikipedia, but Susan Watkins (1875–1913) had such a tragically brief career that she seems to have been overlooked. In the decade before the start of the First World War in Europe, she was one of the most successful American painters in Paris, and a friend (and relative by marriage) of William Merritt Chase. Chase’s Portrait of Susan Watkins was painted a year after Susan Watkins’ death, in her memory, and only a couple of years before Chase himself was to die. She holds a print, which is an allusion to one of her paintings, The Engravings (1910). On her easel, at the right, is another of her works, Morning Room (1910), and beside her head is a large jar of brushes. Susan Watkins was born in California, but her family moved to New York, where her father was an editor for the New York Sun newspaper. She started her training at the Art Students League in 1890, at the age of only fifteen, where she probably first met William Merritt Chase. Her father died in 1896, so she and her mother moved to Paris, where she resumed her training under Raphaël Collin (1850-1916) in an academic style. She submitted her first works to the Salon in 1899, and continued to exhibit there regularly until she left Paris. She also exhibited her work in American galleries, including the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran in Washington, DC. In 1910, Susan Watkins returned to New York, where she continued her career as an acclaimed portraitist, and exhibited Post-Impressionist landscapes and genre scenes. That year she was awarded the Julia A Shaw Memorial Prize, for the best painting or sculpture by an American woman, by the National Academy of Design, in New York. By 1912, though, she had become unwell, and her health began to fail rapidly. She married the Norfolk banker Goldsborough Serpell, and died in June 1913 at the age of only 37. When her husband died in 1946, he left her paintings to the Chrysler Museum of Art; most, though, remain in private collections. We’ll never know whether Susan Watkins’ paintings would have matured to rank with the likes of Mary Cassatt, but she was certainly well on her way. [https://eclecticlight.co/2017/10/21/brief-candles-susan-watkins-the-woman-in-white/]