Portrait of Ethel D. Puffer

Thomas Wilmer Dewing's delicate graphite study captures a young girl with the soft modeling characteristic of his tonalist approach. Working in the tradition of refined American portraiture, Dewing employs subtle gradations and restrained line work to render his subject's direct gaze and carefully observed features. This drawing exemplifies the late nineteenth-century practice of portrait studies, a foundation for the Boston-born artist's later development as a leading figure painter and muralist. The work's intimate scale and technical refinement reflect the era's valuation of drawing as both finished art and preparatory study.