Portrait of Frances C. Houston

About this artwork

Thomas Wilmer Dewing painted his vivacious friend in a seventeenth-century costume in the spirit of Frans Hals or Diego Velázquez, two of their favorite old masters. He wrote to the editor of Century Magazine, praising Houston's "sense of style." Dewing and Frances had studied in Paris, where both artists would have made head studies like this one. After she returned to the United States, Frances married William C. Houston, the proprietor of a Boston department store. The couple purchased prope...