A watercolour study of the head and shoulders of a young woman wearing a large bonnet and facing to right front. Signed at top right: John S. Sargent.

The sitter here is unidentified. Sargent has studied the fall of light on the young woman's face and the large bow of the bonnet tied under her chin, depicting her right shoulder in shadow.

Sargent was the leading portrait painter of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, renowned for his dazzling bravura paintings of society beauties, artists, writers and statesmen of the 1880s and 1890s. His fellow artist Auguste Rodin described him as "the Van Dyck of our times".