The women in Sargent's The Wyndham Sisters are, from left to right: Madeline Adeane, Pamela Tennant, and Mary Constance, aka Lady Elcho.

Above them is a George F. Watts portrait of their late mother, Mrs. Percy Scawen Wyndham. Mrs. Wyndham was born Madeline Caroline Eden Frances Campbell, because the more names, the better. Don't the sisters seem like characters in a Henry James novel? Well, they actually are, in a condensed and repackaged form, characters in James' fiction, and James was informed both by his personal relationship with the fabulous Wyndhams, as well as by Sargent's portrayal of them. Just before James started on a series of short stories from the perspective of the Wyndham sisters, Sargent took James to see this painting. The same year, Sargent met another seminal writer, Edith Wharton, author of The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. The Wyndhams also knew Oscar Wilde, and the prosecutors implicated George Wyndham, the brother of the Wyndham sisters, in Wilde's horrific trial for "gross indecency" and homosexual acts. It was quite the literary crowd. 

The three sisters followed their father, the Hon. Percy Wyndham, who commissioned this work, into the Souls, the exclusive London club that he founded. The name reflects the family's interest in Spiritualism, which was incredibly popular in London.

Not long after his arrival in London, four years before this work, Sargent had become the don dada of society painters, not only for his skill but also for that most unlikely quality of resume builders: humility. Lady Elcho's friend Frances Horner wrote gleefully to a friend of the Wyndhams, Edward Burne-Jones, that Sargent was "very nice and simple, & very shy," and, astonishingly, "not the least like an American...he hated discussing all his great friends…& talking about his pictures."

This work is directly connected to Sargent's decorative painting, such as his mural work for the Boston Public Library, due to its enormous size, in the fact that he composed it on-site, and in its sharp contrast between light and dark colors. The Prince of Wales raved about it, calling the sisters the "three graces." The Wyndhams kept it for twenty-seven years before selling it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley loves this painting, and he draws a connection of inspiration between it and his own work.