Portrait of a Lady

Mollie Chatfield came to be known as a classic “Dewing girl,” a type described in a Boston paper as “intellectual enough to be worthy of Boston, aristocratic enough to be worthy of Philadelphia, well dressed enough to be a New Yorker but seldom pretty enough to evoke the thought of Baltimore.” Thomas Wilmer Dewing showed her with a flirtatious sideward glance, lips slightly parted, and one hand resting self-consciously over her breast. This provocative pose hints at the romantic relationship between artist and model. Dewing’s patron Charles Lang Freer helped the artist keep his affair with Chatfield hidden from his wife, Maria Oakey Dewing. (Hobbs, Beauty Reconfigured: The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, 1996)