The American painter John Singer Sargent, who settled in London in 1886, was renowned for his dazzling paintings of society beauties, artists, writers and statesmen. Late in his life, when he had virtually given up painting portraits, he nonetheless produced a large number of charcoal portrait drawings. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and the Duke of York both sat for Sargent shortly before their marriage, which took place in April 1923. Sargent is said to have described Lady Elizabeth as ‘the only completely unselfconscious sitter I have ever had’.