Existing comment:
Robert Henry Benson 1850–1929
As senior partner of his family's venerable merchant banking firm, Robert Henry Benson financed innovations in electrical power and machinery, as well as the expansion of railways in the United States and Canada. Benson devoted much of his wealth to collecting art. Together with his wife, Evelyn Holford, he acquired important examples of Chinese porcelain and assembled a world-renowned collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian paintings.
Benson was also interested in contemporary art and became a friend of Sargent's after buying his painting Cashmere (1908) from the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1909. The financier commissioned Sargent to produce at least six charcoal portraits of himself and his family. Even in this relatively spare composition, the careful modeling of Benson's face suggests the kindly and placid disposition for which he was widely admired.
Charcoal on paper, 1912
Collection of Mr. Robin Benson
This is the National Portrait Gallery sign in the exhibit. |