Robert Henri, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916

Scott Rothkopf: I'm Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.  

This is a portrait of the Whitney's founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, which was painted by Robert Henri in 1916. Around this time, Mrs. Whitney began to have a club for artists in New York called the Whitney Studio Club, and she would invite artist friends of hers like Henri to come to parties to see exhibitions, to take drawing classes. 

She also happened to be an artist herself, so she cared a lot about the artists in her community that she wanted to support, whether that was financially or through public exhibition and attention. 

Robert Henri was one of those artists, and he chose to paint Mrs. Whitney in a way that today could seem almost old fashioned, but at the time was very daring and even almost scandalous. At the time, you never would've portrayed a woman of this social station in pajamas. She wouldn't have been lying down like this with her arm outstretched in a kind of come hither pose and glance on her face.

And here we see her beckoning us as a very modern woman, a proud woman, a woman who is confident in her self-presentation, whether that has to do with her pose, the clothes she's wearing. This portrait was so scandalous at the time, in fact, that it couldn't even be shown in her home on Fifth Avenue. It had to hang in her studio where it would be seen by artists who, like her, understood what it meant to be alive in their time and open to new ideas.