Ellen Sturgis Hooper, (1872-1974) left in this portrait, and younger sister Mabel H. Hooper (1875-1944) were born to wealth and privilege in Boston, MA. They are shown standing for a portrait – perhaps in the family’s home then located at 25 Reservoir Street in Cambridge, MA – around 1885. The photographer was George Collins Cox, (1851–1903) who would became notable for his portraits of Henry Ward Beecher beginning around 1880, and several years after this portrait was taken- of American poet Walt Whitman in 1887.

Ellen was born in 1872 to Edward William Hooper (1839-1901) and Fanny Hudson Chapin (1844-1881) the same year Hooper became Steward of Harvard College and the couple built their Cambridge home.

Ellen may be best remembered today as the subject of an unfinished portrait by American artist James McNeill Whistler begun in 1890. Edward Hooper, a collector of Whistler’s paintings, commissioned the painter in June of that year, offering him:

“200 guineas for ‘A small full length in water color or a head in oil’…If it will not bore you to make for me a “note” of my oldest daughter – a red haired girl about seventeen years old – it will give me great satisfaction to have you do so … [we] shall be in London only two weeks more, and my daughter is not very strong so that it will not be possible to have more than ten sittings of about an hour each.” (1.)

Mabel, who would go on to become a writer and gifted artist, (with work in the Smithsonian Art Museum) married Bancel LaFarge (1865-1938), the son of American painter John LaFarge.

1. YMSM 391 Portrait of Ellen Sturgis Hooper: The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, a Catalogue Raisonné online database accessed 2024.