Completed by Lindauer during his later years, this intimate portrait depicts the artist's second wife Rebecca, whom he married in 1885. Her ornate Victorian dress references the period and fashion, although she seems almost unaware of what she wears. Lindauer has imbued her with a direct, ponderous gaze that draws the viewer into her eyes as she watches her husband study the landscape of her face. He produces a tender, noble representation of his beloved, the softness and radiance of her skin imbued with the contours of her life's worth of emotion and experience which appears to be the sole focus of this work. Portraits in themselves are documents of time and place that reference history in their convention alone. There is a sense of the inevitable fate of humanity, the course of life and the expiration of any given individual, nominally the sitter, which is attached to every portrait. This is heightened by the fact that the portrait will usually outlast its reference point and, in many ways, this is its purpose – to survive as a reminder of those we wish to honour. The genre in itself is a pursuit to solidify the essence of someone's being – it is a conversation between artist and sitter, beyond simply acting as a purely visual representation. It attempts to capture something of the character of the sitter and inevitably references the artist's relationship with their subject. IMOGEN KERR