The modish hairstyle, form-fitting dress, and aggressively casual pose help to identify this sitter as a flapper--the name given to liberated young American women during the Roaring Twenties. Guy Pène du Bois is said to have found his inspiration for this painting in the work of another chronicler of the era, the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose 1922 short story "Gretchen's Forty Winks" featured the character Gretchen Halsey, "a bright-colored, Titian-haired girl, vivid as a French rag doll."
