When Lady Meux approached Whistler to paint her portrait, the artist was mired in scandal. He was bankrupted by a lawsuit he had lodged against the critic John Ruskin and had just returned from Venice to a London art scene in which he was no longer the top society portraitist. But Lady Meux was no stranger to notoriety: born Valerie Susan Langdon, she had worked as a bartender and actress before meeting and marrying Sir Henry Bruce Meux, heir to a large brewery fortune. She was never accepted by her husband’s family or class-conscious British society at large. Somewhat eccentric, she collected Egyptian art and reportedly rode exotic animals to public events, such as an elephant to a hunt and a carriage drawn by zebras. In the early 1880s, she requested from the down-and-out Whistler not one but three portraits of her: in addition to this one, one depicting her in black wearing diamonds is now in the Honolulu Museum of Art, and a third, of her head-to-toe in furs, was destroyed by the artist after an argument with her.

Peering out from the shadow of her hat—which the writer Henry James criticized as ill-fitting—Lady Meux pulls her chiffon train trimmed in pink satin close to her body and offers a slender profile silhouette set against the pinks and grays of the curtain behind her. When she died, after enduring a lifetime of rejection by her husband’s family, she left her entire fortune to a military hero who lived nearby and who had been kind to her at a horse race.