On February 23, 1924, Grand Central Art Galleries opened Retrospective Exhibition of the Important Works of John Singer Sargent. The exhibition presented 60 oil paintings and 12 watercolors, including major portraits such as Portrait of Mrs. H. F. Hadden, The Lady with the Rose, and Portrait of Mrs. Fiske Warren and Daughter, as well as the landscape Lake O'Hara. The show was staged as a benefit for the endowment fund of the Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association, the cooperative behind Grand Central Art Galleries, with which Sargent had been actively involved from the beginning. Coming near the end of Sargent's life, it publicly framed him not merely as a fashionable portraitist but as a central institutional supporter of an artist-led New York gallery model.
The retrospective helped consolidate Sargent's late-career standing while supporting Grand Central's artist-run exhibition system.
