The photograph of Miss Child showing the original background.
The identification is uncertain. If this is Miss Child she possibly originated from Los Angeles though she would have been painted in New York. In a letter to Sir Joseph Duveen written from Pescadero Point on August 7, 1928 the artists says that while on the way to visit Louis Hill, son of James J. Hill, he ‘stopped on the way for a day and night at Santa Barbara where I stayed with Mr. & Mrs. John Child, those friends of mine from the Plaza Hotel.’ (Duveen Archive, Getty Research Institute, Box 381) This is almost certainly a reference to the sitter’s parents. Painted about 1915. This may be a duplicate of an original the family commissioned and which the artist kept for himself, but whose landscape background he altered in the 1940s.
