Robert Henri's Girl with Muff (1912) comes at the highpoint of his career as a portraitist and Ashcan School leader. By 1912 he had moved past the dark, tonal manner of his early work shaped by Manet and Whistler, and toward the brighter color that defined his mature style on the eve of the 1913 Armory Show. The sitter is six-year-old Mary de Hart Andrews, of a prominent Seattle pioneering family.

Nearly life-size, she stands against a shadowy ground broken only by a loose brown passage at left and flickers of orange at right. Her wine-red coat is trimmed in black velvet and closed with rows of black frogging; a black muff rests at her waist. Her blonde hair falls past her shoulders, and her face is given far more finish than the coat, where Henri's brush moves in broad, wet strokes. 

The painting carries authentication number H 29 from Henri's studio and was long held by the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Foundation in North Carolina, a philanthropy tied to Duke University. A 2019 letter of scholarly opinion by Valerie Ann Leeds, PhD, the leading Henri scholar, documents his process and the sitter's identity. Comparable child portraits are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, and the Brooklyn Museum.