Shawl In The Family

THE QUEST FOR A LEGENDARY TEXTILE PAINTED BY JOHN SINGER SARGENT LEADS TO THE PRIVATE QUARTERS OF ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS HOUSES IN ENGLAND.

- William Middleton

THE GREAT AMERICAN PAINTER JOHN Singer Sargent, with his tremendous sensitivity to style, had found the perfect element for his art. It was a large cashmere shawl from India, cream-colored with an oversize paisley pattern in muted browns and grays, that was elegant, poetic, and very exotic. Sargent asked his niece Rose-Marie Ormond to pose for a series of works enveloped in the scarf. In his 1911 watercolor The Cashmere Shawl, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Rose-Marie stands in a pale taffeta gown with a lilac headscarf, the cashmere wrapped around her waist and draped over her full-length skirt. For Two Girls in White Dresses, 1909–11, a painting in the collection of the English country manor Houghton Hall, Sargent imagined mirrored images of his niece reclining in an Impressionistic swirl of ivory taffeta and paisley, while in Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911, at the National Gallery of Artin Washington, D.C., she sinks back into a sofa, the paisley pattern reproduced in the rich green upholstery. But the most spectacular Sargent painting to make use of the design is Cashmere, circa 1908, where seven different versions of Rose-Marie’s younger sister Reine extend across the canvas wrapped and draped in the shawl (in December 1996 at Sotheby’s in New York, Cashmere sold to a private collector for a then-record-breaking $11.1 million).