This portrait was made of the sitter, born Jane Erin Emmet (1873–1961), in the year of her marriage to the artist Wilfrid de Glehn (1870–1951). An American of Irish descent, she could trace her family back to the Robert Emmet ‘The Bold.’ She was also a cousin of the novelist Henry James. Both her older sisters Rosina Emmet Sherwood (1854–1948) and Lydia Field Emmet (1866–1952) would also become successful artists. 'Jano' as she wanted to be called, began her career while studying at the New York's Art Students League and later in Paris.
She had been famously represented painting in the company of her husband by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), in The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, three years later than our drawing, in 1907 (fig. 1, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. Inv.1914.57). Both husband and wife were accomplished painters in their own right, and the three travelled together frequently in Italy and Spain and the Alps between 1905 and 1914, often depicting each other in their paintings.
The American painter and printmaker Johnathan Eastman Johnson travelled to Europe in 1848 to study drawing at the Düsseldorf Akademie. During his two year stay there he studied painting under Emanuel Leutze (1816 Württemberg - 1868 Washington D.C.), the German born American history painter, and painted genre subjects including The Counterfeiters (c.1851–5; New York, IBM Corp.). He then spent three years in The Hague, studying colour, composition, and naturalism in 17th century Dutch painting. The influence of the Dutch masters on his portrait style was so great that he became known as ‘the American Rembrandt’. In 1855, after two months in Thomas Couture’s Paris studio, he returned to America where he concentrated on American subject-matter, making studies of the Chippewa tribe in Lake Superior. His turning point came in 1859 with the exhibition in New York of his Negro Life in the South (New-York Historical Society). His ambiguous picture of the leisure activities of a group of slaves was a sensation at a time when the topic of slavery was being universally debated, and it resulted in his election as an Associate to the National Academy of Design. For the next two decades, Johnson explored themes of national life with his humble interior scenes and larger rural tableaux, based on careful study through numerous drawings and oil sketches.
Johnson exhibited widely and was active in the National Academy, the Century and Union League Clubs, the Metropolitan Museum, and even the Society of American Artists, a group normally associated with a younger generation of painters. He was at ease in upper-class society, owned a large home in Manhattan, and spent his summers on the island of Nantucket, the scene of many of his paintings. During the last twenty years of his life, his work changed distinctly. Although he had found success as a genre painter, he gave it up for unknown reasons and returned to portraiture, the artistic activity of his youth. Able to command extremely large fees, he spent the rest of his life painting the likenesses of prominent gentlemen in New York City, where he died in 1906, two years after he drew this portrait of Jane Erin Emmett.

Fig. 1: John Singer Sargent, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, 1907, oil on canvas, 71.4 × 56.5 cm (28 1/8 × 22 1/4 in.). Art Institute of Chicago.