At the Art Institute, this is the single watercolor in a room of six massive vertical oils. These others limn department-store heiresses and meat ladies. The oil portraits sometimes seem more intent on flattering the costly Worth dresses than ladies’ dashingly rendered local faces, their supplemental chins hastily euphemized but nonetheless suggested. One lady confronts us from alongside a Great Dane dog, obviously borrowed, and she holds a riding crop. But there’s an unfortunate assumption that she is about to hop sidesaddle onto the beast and whip it into service as an unwilling form of transportation. Just this April, I myself loitered in the echoing chamber of white marble. For forty minutes, I listened with feigned detachment as talkative gallery visitors discussed the museum’s cluster of its choicest Sargents. I swear that, a hundred-odd years after the picture was done and forty-some years after its subject’s death, the picture’s freshness still seems to grow.

After being overawed (even somewhat enjoyably snubbed) by the nine-foot oils, the more diligent lookers often come to rest before this, the smallest painting of the seven. I love to see viewers linger here longest. We find a woman vertical beyond an upturned steamer trunk, as if some household is in transit, and yet a still life has been improvised atop the trunk where one outstretched and elegant hand pivots. A wash of cobalt blue fills that hand with quick implied blood. What best distinguishes this picture from its mannequin companions is the way it presents a person plainly meditating on something, some fact or idea visibly satisfying. Simply put, it is a watercolor of a woman not handsome, not hideous, but shown, under her overhanging eave of a black hat, thinking something.

I can imagine Muriel, just before she surrendered her small masterwork to the Institute. I see her just prior to achieving her clan’s (and her own) permanent detour past the squat alley entrance marked DELIVERIES AND STAFF. Easy to picture her just before yielding to History as she somewhat wished it. Muriel is seated at the parlor’s rent-to-own Chickering upright, an instrument long since rented unto ownership. A slow, sweet snoring from one room away means Mama, resting well. Outside, some roving street vendor cries, “Nice and sharp, let me put the edge back on those knives and scissors. Cut into anything. Get ’em nice and sharp for you today?”

Over that and alongside it, I hear Muriel, retired, playing a favorite Field nocturne, at noon. Notes accumulate under and around her like brush strokes, like paychecks; like all the pinfeathers required to make one airworthy wing, angel-white or hen-brown. She touches keys while studying the mantel’s picture that, through the saving mystery of Art, is notable because it is not merely herself, and yet somewhat is, herself. Muriel plays today, for free, for joy, for no one but herself.