Leonor Fini’s Portrait of Myles Sherman Lowell (1955–1960) dates from the decade when she was among the best-known painters in Paris and portraiture had become a pillar of her career. She had taken commissions since her teens, and her sitters ranged from Jean Genet and Anna Magnani to Margot Fonteyn, Leonora Carrington and Lady Diana Cooper. 

Lowell emerges from a near-black ground, his face lit as if by a single lamp. His dark hair is swept back, his heavy brows set low over amber eyes that meet the viewer directly, and the hint of a smile pulls at his mouth. Fini cools his jaw with soft gray-green shadow and stretches his neck into a long, slender column, a touch of the Mannerist elegance she admired. 

A Michigan native and Amherst graduate, Lowell followed his father into real estate and settled in Beverly Hills, but Paris was his lifelong love affair. He kept an apartment on Avenue Montaigne and moved easily between European ballrooms, ski slopes, Newport mansions and Palm Springs. Friends remembered his wit, his charm, his gift for turning names and places into stories — and the Schnauzer almost always at his side. 

He likely met Fini in that Parisian social world. Accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Leonor Fini Estate, Paris, the portrait captures a man of the world in his thirties, painted by one of the city’s most sought-after portraitists.