Miss Holland sat for at least four paintings by Duncan Grant, all of which were made in his studio at 8 Fitzroy Street, London (figs. 1–3). Two works depict her seated against a yellow buff wall on a blue-backed chair (fig. 2), and a third shows her using the same chair and seated against a vermilion pink wall (fig. 1). The sitter was a professional artist’s model and a relation of Oscar Wilde. Little else is known about her save for her appearance, as recorded by Grant’s paintings. The sitter’s averted gaze and vacant expression invest all of these portraits with a mood of introspection.

Miss Holland sat for Grant in the 1930s, though it is not clear when exactly. For many years, Grant retained another of his paintings of Miss Holland in his personal collection, lending it to the Tate Gallery retrospective of his work in 1959; the work was dated at the time as circa 1934. In Simon Watney’s monograph on Grant, the same picture was dated to 1934 in a caption, though the body of the text refers to it as a work of 1932. A third painting of Miss Holland, entitled Pour Vous (‘For You’), has traditionally been dated to the period between 1930 and 1937; it is believed that Grant kept it in his studio and worked on it gradually over this extended period. (Pour Vous was long owned by the painter collector Edward Le Bas, a friend of the Bloomsbury artists who himself lived for a time in Bedford Square.)

The portraits of Miss Holland are canonical works in Grant’s oeuvre. Different examples have been included in the most important retrospectives of his work, including those held at the Tate Gallery in 1959 and at Wildenstein in 1964. They represent a high watermark in his mature period, successfully translating light and shade into terms of pure colour. In the present example, the sitter’s face is painted in fresh hues of pink, purple, orange, red and green. The light falls from the right-hand side, casting shadows of mauve purple onto the blue chair. The loose, handicraft brushwork indicates a rapid execution made urgent by the presence of the sitter.