After Rose-Marie Ormond’s death in 1918, John Singer Sargent penned an emotional letter to his sister, and the mother of Rose-Marie, Violet Ormond. In this letter, he wrote that he would remember Rose-Marie as “the most charming girl that ever lived.” Rose-Marie, Sargent’s favorite niece and favorite model, had been killed by a German bomb which hit the church of Saint-Gervais in Paris. She was only 25 years old. Although her life was cruelly cut short, Rose-Marie greatly impacted everyone who met her, from her friends and family to the blinded soldiers she nursed at the Hospital des Quinze Vingts in Paris.

Rose-Marie Ormond was born in Tunis in 1893 to the young and newly married Violet and Francis Ormond. Violet and Francis, unready to give up their fast-paced, nomadic lifestyle, sent their eldest children to live with Ormond’s mother, Marguerite. Known to all as Bonne-Maman, the aristocratic and formidable Marguerite became especially attached to Rose-Marie and her elder sister, Marguerite, and ultimately did not return the girls to their parents and four younger siblings. Though the eldest two girls were raised in a palatial residence in Switzerland with their doting Bonne-Maman, they were undoubtedly somewhat lonely apart from their parents and siblings. The solution, between the years of 1904 and 1914, emerged as an annual summer gathering in the Alps which included the Sargent-Ormond family along with select family friends. The Ormonds’ uncle, John Singer Sargent, came with his paints and with exotic costumes and recruited the children of his friends and his nieces and nephews to be his models. Over the decade of Alpine summers, Sargent produced a significant body of work.

It was during these blissful summers spent in the Alps where Rose-Marie first emerged as “a particularly attractive subject.” Many of the paintings Sargent made depicting the Alpine summer group are not individually recognizable. This does not apply, however, for many of the works which include Rose-Marie, such as The Brook (1907), The Cashmere Shawl (ca. 1910), Simplon Pass: Reading (1911), and Simplon Pass: The Lesson (1911). Indeed, Corsano and Williman write that Rose-Marie was “the definite young star of Sargent’s figure studies…she lights up and transforms these pictures with her lovely features and bright spirit.” Rose-Marie was not necessarily Sargent’s favorite model because her features were any more striking than those of her sisters or friends, but because she was so full of life, so expressive, that Sargent was able to capture her essence with a “sparkling immediacy.”

Sargent’s portrait of Rose-Marie, Rose-Marie Ormond (1912), is a triumph of a painting, a depiction of “his muse in her own adult person”. The warm light which falls on Rose-Marie illuminates her face, hands, and cashmere shawl and lends them an angelic quality. Yet, Rose-Marie does not appear aloof or otherworldly. Instead, her gentle smile and bright, kind eyes convey the liveliness which Sargent so loved, and which allow the viewer to connect with her. There is an emphasis on her hands, which Sargent had recently cast in bronze, and a “distinctly neoclassical” inspiration in the composition and execution of the portrait which privileges clarity and composure. This portrait of the mature Rose-Marie was created soon before her marriage to Robert André-Michel, son of the renowned art historian André Michel and an impressive historian in his own right. Viewing Rose-Marie Ormond, it is difficult to imagine that this vibrant, young woman and her husband would soon become casualties of the War. However, Robert, a soldier, and Rose-Marie, nurse to the blind, were heroes who bravely made their mark on the world and deeply believed in the cause they fought for. In making Rose-Marie Ormond, Sargent broke his declaration from 1907 that he would make “no more portraits”–– or “paughtraits”, as he wrote in a satirical letter to a friend. While this was specifically directed towards portrait commissions, which Sargent found unenjoyable and stifling, rather than portraits of friends and family, Sargent’s creation of Rose-Marie Ormond nonetheless demonstrates both his devotion to his niece and the genuine enjoyment he received from painting her. Rose-Marie truly lives on in this portrait, which serves as a testament both to her internal and external beauty and to Sargent’s great love and skill.

The following passage was excerpted from the catalogue raisonné, John Singer Sargent: The Later Portraits.

Rose-Marie Ormond (1893-1918) was the artist's niece and one of his favorite models. Born in Tunis, the second daughter of Sargent's sister Violet and her husband, Francis Ormond, she was largely brought up by her French grandmother, Marie-Marguerite Ormond. She married Robert André-Michel, son of the conservateur du Musée du Louvre, in 1913. Michel, an art historian, wrote an important book on the Papal palace at Avignon. He was killed near Soissons in October 1914, and Rose-Marie died in Paris on March 29, 1918, when the church of Saint-Gervais, in the place Lobau, where she was listening to a concert, was hit by a German shell. Sargent's fondness for Rose-Marie is confirmed by his surviving correspondence with her, in French (private collection). News of her death provoked from him a rare emotional outburst of feeling. In a letter to his sister from Boston (April 3, 1918), he wrote: "I have just got the terrible telegram of Rose-Marie's death – and I can't tell you how sorry I am for you, and you all, and how I feel the loss of the most charming girl who ever lived" (private collection).

The portrait may have been painted to celebrate the sitter's engagement – she married the following summer. It is one of a rare group of late portraits and can be compared in style and pose to The Countess of Rocksavage of 1913 (no. 566). The use of the cashmere shawl continued the decorative themes of Sargent's group of female portraits of 1907-08, and of his contemporary Alpine figure studies, for which Rose-Marie frequently modeled.

Rose-Marie is wearing a cream-colored cashmere shawl with green border and is posed with her arms gracefully folded – Sargent admired her delicate hands and took two casts from them (Slade School of Art, London, and private collection) – seated on what appears to be a day-bed, the wooden end visible on the right, her right elbow resting in the folds of a green cushion or piece of fabric. The portrait is distinctly neoclassical in inspiration. When it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913, one reviewer noted in it the "suggestion of a French eighteenth-century portrait come to life" (Spectator, May 3, 1913, p. 755).