Widely admired as one of America's finest portrait painters, Thomas Eakins often rendered his subjects with uncompromising realism. Weda Cook, a popular singer who earned acclaim for setting some of Walt Whitman's poetry to music, was a good friend of the artist and his wife. The sitter's pensive, somewhat melancholic expression demonstrates Eakins' tremendous skill for revealing psychological character in his portraits. The artist painted another image of Cook, The Concert Singer, which is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.