Author of more than a dozen volumes of verse, Marianne Moore received virtually every major literary award-including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award-that the United States had to offer. Her exquisitely crafted poems, one critic declared, "bear the indisputable mark of high style." But perhaps the highest tribute came from fellow poet T. S. Eliot, who placed Moore's work among "the small body of durable poetry written in our time."

Moore sat for this portrait by Gaston Lachaise a year before the publication of her early collection of poems, entitled Observations. By the time the likeness was finished, she had posed six times, but Lachaise still did not consider the piece done to his satisfaction. Years later, Moore marveled: "Despite the difficulties I presented as a subject with what indomitable skill Lachaise worked." She remembered with special fondness the "patient skill" with which he honored her preferences in the placement of her hairpins.