Rosa Corder was an artist who made portraits and painted racehorses, among other subjects. Like Whistler, she exhibited her work at the Royal Academy of Arts and Grosvenor Gallery in London. In 1878, her lover, Charles Howell, a notorious figure in the London art scene and one-time agent of Whistler’s, paid Whistler the relatively large sum of one hundred guineas for this full-length portrait. Whistler was reportedly inspired to paint it after having caught a glimpse of Rosa wearing a brown dress passing by a black doorway, though the process of making the portrait was not so swift: he demanded of her some forty grueling sittings standing with her head tilted upward in front of a doorway to a shuttered room. Some contemporaries criticized the painting’s darkness, but Arrangement in Black and Brown was hailed by others as bearing painted passages worthy of Velàzquez and praised for the model’s “quiet authority”—“one of the most noble feminine figures that one could encounter.” Set off against the darkness of her attire and setting, Rosa presents her vibrant face in profile. She was described by one contemporary, the English actress Ellen Terry, as “one of those plain-beautiful women who are far more attractive than some of the pretty ones.”