Following the favorable critical reception of his Young Woman in Black (1902, Art Institute of Chicago), Robert Henri painted a number of similar life-size, grand manner studio portraits of professional and amateur models that he submitted to exhibitions to demonstrate his command of the full-length format. Two of the most important examples of this type date from 1904: Lady in Black (The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York), a portrait of his first wife, and Young Woman in White, a portrait of the Czech-born professional artist’s model Eugenie Stein. Henri may have been encouraged to pursue these types of studio portraits when his Girl in White Waist (1901, destroyed) was purchased in January 1904 by the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, thus becoming his first painting to enter an American museum’s permanent collection.

Known as "Zenka” or “Efzenka," Eugenie Stein was an immigrant, working class woman. She knew Dolly Sloan, the wife of Henri’s friend and artistic comrade, the painter John Sloan, who called her "a great girl, so ingenious, so paintable, the best professional model in New York probably, though my own experience is small." ^[1] Little is known about Stein, other than Sloan's statement that "she had strong opinions on politics and society and her English was odd but understandable." ^[2] Henri shared Sloan’s admiration of Eugenie and painted her a number of times.

Executed in a single day, Henri recorded the essential details of Stein’s clothing in Young Woman in White in his record book: "Yellow scarf, straw hat with white lace and black lace. White gloves half on." ^[3] Wearing a long white dress, Stein stands in profile with her hands clasped together at her waist. She is dramatically illuminated by a powerful source of light that emanates from her right. Her psychological disposition is mysterious: standing off-center and slightly withdrawn, she faces the light with an attitude of composed anticipation. Following the examples of Francisco de Goya and Édouard Manet, Henri imbued his subject with a powerful presence by placing her in a dark, empty setting that emphasizes the contours of her gown. ^[4] All the props common to portraits of the period are eliminated so that nothing distracts the viewer's attention from the model. Even the fluidly painted dress plays a subordinate role, adhering to Henri's admonition to his students to "never get drapery unless you do it to express its beauty on a woman." ^[5]

Henri ultimately did not intend his full-length portraits to be simple, literal likenesses of specific individuals. Instead, he used them to capture abstract qualities that he described as "another dimension—that fascinating fourth if you like—which has to do with your concept of the significance of the whole—that ultra something which always engages your interest more than mere facts of the person standing before you." ^[6] As its title declares, Young Woman in White is a monochromatic tonal study in the tradition of James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, a painting that Henri greatly admired as "a fantasy . . . a spiritual expression" in which “the frailty and delicacy of her dress are opposed to the solidity and strength of her." ^[7] This observation applies equally well to Young Woman in White, which, like Whistler’s complex early works, balances aestheticism with an attention to the realities of the sitter’s physical appearance.

The painting occupies a unique place along the spectrum between aestheticism and realism. Henri’s adherence to realism in Young Woman in White clearly distinguishes it from the conventional narrow-waisted and youthful ideals of feminine beauty that often appeared in the formal exhibition portraits by his academically oriented contemporaries John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. ^[8] Alternately, Henri’s aesthetic proclivities in this instance become evident when the painting is juxtaposed with the three-quarter-length portrait of 1904, Zenka (Portrait of Eugenie Stein), in which he portrays Stein, as one critic later put it, as the “grand dame of the disreputable with her toothless, sunken jaw, her leery eyes, her great befeathered hat, flamboyant dress, and brown kid gloves.” ^[9] Both works bear comparison to Alfred H. Maurer’s contemporary portrait Jeanne (c. 1904, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), whose subject even more blatantly flaunts the traditional social and artistic conventions of the day, as she raises a cigarette to her lips and peers brazenly at the viewer from under her outlandish straw hat.

The unlined, medium-weight, plain-weave fabric was remounted on an old but nonoriginal stretcher. The tacking margins are intact. ^[10] The artist prepared the thick, smooth, grey ground that partially covers the tacking margins. Oil paint was applied thickly in complex layers with moderate to high impasto. X-radiographs suggest that the subject’s face was originally in a frontal position, and that the left side of her body extended much farther to the right. These changes were not apparent during infrared examination. ^[11] Other than minor areas of retouching in the subject’s face, the background, and the bottom edge, the painting is in very good condition. The surface was coated with a thick layer of randomly and unevenly applied natural resin varnish, which is now markedly discolored. The inscription "19/C" is located on the upper left reverse of the canvas.