This guy is a real interesting and eccentric character. He was a supporter of Sargent and commissioned a number of portraits, this being one of them. In many ways George Vanderbilt defined his generation of what Mark Twain would call the Gilded Age.
From his inheritance from his parents he would set out to build the largest private home in the United States, the Biltmore House in Asheville North Carolina, and would employ the most renowned architects and artisans to build it and he would amass an amazing collection of art.
His name was George Washington Vanderbilt IIIÂ -- the youngest of eight kids and he lived 1861-1914.
Unlike any other person, a whole lithely of Sargent paintings can be used to describes the links of George Vanderbilt’s life.
The painting was orriginally thought to have been done at the time of the other two commissions -- Hunt and Olmsted (1895) but Ormond and Kilmurray publish in their book "Portraits of the 1890's" that a faint date of 1890 can be found and that it was probably painted in New York.