BY WILLIAM MIDDLETON

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.

SHAWL IN

THE FA MILY

T

HE GREAT AMERICAN PAINTER JOHN

Singer Sargent, with his tremendous sen-

sitivity to style, had found the perfect ele-

ment 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 head scarf, 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 Art

in 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 can-

vas 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).

Decades after he painted them, Sargent’s dramatic rep-

resentations captured the imagination of his great-niece,

English textile authority Jenny Housego, whose grand-

mother, Violet Sargent Ormond, was the artist’s sister. A

former curator at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum,

Housego moved to New Delhi in 1989, devoting herself to

the creation of luxurious handmade textiles. The more she

studied her great-uncle’s masterworks, the more she realized

that the shawls in his paintings were all the same. “It looks

like a procession, but it is in fact just one girl, my aunt, with

the same shawl in different poses,” she observes.

The Palladian country home Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England, where an original shawl

used in John Singer Sargent’s paintings was discovered. OPPOSITE: Sargent’s niece

Rose-Marie Ormond, wrapped in the shawl for his 1911 portrait Nonchaloir (Repose).