There is a photo in the Met of the couple on their wedding day but it cannot be downloaded. It is also amazingly unhelpful in terms of identification but a fascinating photo.

Attached is a three-image composite of this portrait with two known photographs of Janet Harlan. Her thin and long eyebrows and the place where her hair parts appear similar in all three images.

The coal mining of Harlan County, Kentucky in the Appalchians is known for its folk and country music, but this may well be coincidence
xee George Davis' Harlan County Blues

It might be the ex-wife, but the evidence is not conclusive.

With respect, Jacinto, if the evidence was conclusive this Discussion would not have been posted.

With respect, Jacinto, had the evidence been conclusive, this Discussion would never have been posted.

In 1931, Janet Harlan was 29. The sitter in this portrait looks older to me, quite possibly in her forties.

And Kieran, I should have said that the evidence, obviously thus far, is not sufficiently convincing, hence the need for more evidence and, implicitly, this discussion.

I am going to say what I have said before. A painted portrait is a likeness. It isn't a photo taken for the purpose of scientifically identifying the sitter.
One of the things that you cannot trust is the apparent age of the person, since the elements that might make a person look 10 years older than they were at the time, may be quite subtle.
And the precise proportions of the face may not be measurably the same as in a photo.
The other consideration is that an artist may work hard on getting some elements of the face correct and paint others in a generic manner. Ears, for example.
That said- I think that the three images in the composite represent the same person.
The forehead is straight, not rounded, and the hair springs from about the same height in each picture.
The eyebrows are a notable feature of this sitter, and the artist has paid attention to them. They spring from close to the bridge of the nose, and low towards the eye, arching upward in a curve.
The amount of eyelid showing beneath the upper fold is comparable, given that in the painting, the sitter is looking downwards.
The bridge of the nose is markedly high, and this is another distinctive feature of this particular face.
The proportions from eyes to nose to chin are similar. the proportions from nose to mouth to chin are similar.
The coloured part of the lips is quite thin in every case.
The curve of the lips and general facial expression is similar, despite the face that the painted image is looking in a different direction.

I can't see any evidence for these NOT being all the same person.
My analysis (for what it is worth) would lead me to think they ARE the same person.

Tamsyn Taylor above pours cold water on the question whether painted portraits can help with establishing the sitters identity and then provides a very strong case for identifying the portrait as the artists wife based on the unusually high proportion of similar facial characteristics.

I think we can safely say either this is a portrait of or else it portrays another woman who looked virtually identical.

Art experts are wary of accepting the merits of any sort of facial recognition and it is even described as a dangerous practice.

There are extraordinary works of art from ancient Egypt from the 3rd,2nd, and 1st centuries BCE. For one hundred years Egyptian art experts like Cyril Aldred, doyen of Egyptian art studies, insisted ancient artist had no concept of lifelike art. One art expert even claimed he had produced a mathematical proof that the bust of Nefertiti must have been an imaginary portrait of the antiquity's most famous Queen.

Today art experts should know better and it getting to the stage where we might conclude it is racist to continue to maintain Aldred's line of argument for art from ancient foreign lands.

Techniques for producing facial reconstructions first developed by Prof Gerasimov in Moscow have enabled lifelike reconstructions to be made from the skulls of Royal mummies. One of these mummies bears a remarkably clear resemblance to the famous bust of Nefertiti still in Berlin. Most of the independent examinations of the mummy rule out an identification of this young Lady as Nefertiti her age at death shows she died while still a teenager. However Nefertiti had six daughters and it appears highly probable this Lady is Princess Meritaten her eldest daughter. The mummy has two small cosmetic perforations in her ear lobe. Egyptian and Amarna artists were often good at accurately reproducing lifelike ear patterns and several of the statues of the Amarna Princesses indicate identical double ear perforations.

It is unhelpful for modern art experts to constantly undermine the ability of artists, ancient or modern, to reproduce recognisable lifelike portraits and people's ability to recognise the portraits of different people.

Where no other initial evidence such as provenance is available facial recognition can often tell us where to start looking for the identification of the sitter and in many instances this original recognition will turn out to be the correct.

The starting point for any art lesson is about looking. Why anyone who has an individual person in front of them for the purposes of being painted would ignore that person in front of them and reproduce for example a "generic ear" is beyond me. Perhaps it might happen if the painting were finished at a different time or from insufficient recollection without the subject available? I suppose some very early pictures where style overrides much of the individuality might also be an exception. None of those seems the case here, or in most cases - there might be limited detail, but if there is detail it seems highly unlikely to be made up out of whole cloth.

If Trubee's marriage collapsed as a result of some infidelity with another woman, the divorce papers, if any such exist at Reno, might name that person and lead to an identification of the sitter in the portrait as being her. However, a better way forward for now might be for the collection to scour its records to see how and why this portrait ended up in its possession.

Also, the third photograph in the attached re-ordered composite dates from 1923 and is taken from the yearbook of Smith College High School, Northampton, Massachusetts, when Harlan was 21.

Sorry, wrong attachment!

Our sitter, apart from looking older than 29 to me, looks harsher or more "hard-boiled" than the photos of Harlan from a few years earlier. The eyebrows are more likely to be what was then fashionable than a distinctive personal trait. I agree that provenance must be looked into, especially since this picture would seem to be in the wrong collection.

This sitter presumably has some connection with the English Folk Song and Dance movement in which the most important figure was Cecil Sharp.
Are sure thatTrubee is the artist and not a painter with greater connections with Britain?

Would it make more sense for the sitter to be related to the collection? Would someone like Ursula Vaughan Williams (the composer's second wife, and latterly President of the English Folk Dance and Song Society) be a more obvious connection? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Vaughan_Williams

Most images of her seem to be from when she was much older, but there are some photos of her online as a younger woman, for example on the cover of this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Poems-Ursula-Vaughan-Williams/dp/0952870657 or in this article by John Bridcut: https://bit.ly/3arOQi1

I'm not saying it's her (she would have been 20 in 1931) – she is just one of a number of other prominent women who were key members of the Society over time.

The picture is signed with what looks very much like "Trubee '31" in the top right corner and the signature matches the one in the same position on a picture here (https://bit.ly/3DsNJeL) credited to John Trubee. And a very similar subject illustrated here (https://bit.ly/2YqtEX7) of "Miss Caroline Bancroft with a painting of herself by John Trubee in Paris in 1924". And here's yet another pretty young lady in the 20s with bobbed hair, looking right (https://bit.ly/3iJRpRm). You might say he had a type.

So it is signed and is similar to other portraits from the same period and suggests Trubee is the painter. But it also hints that the resemblance to his (ex-)wife, for which Tamsyn makes a very good case, might be a bit muddied by generic similarity to his usual subjects. I'm tempted to assume this isn't of Janet Harlan, simply because you don't really sit to be painted by a man who deserted you three years before and from whom you have just been embarrassingly divorced, but she's probably the best match at the moment. Though if this was painted before John Trubee's return to the US in October 1931, she may not even have been on the same continent.

The style of the painting doesn't quite match the others, possibly earlier ones, being less finished. That may reflect a change in style, though I can't find any later paintings, or just mean this was ore of a sketch. The collection may be able to dig out more to hint at the sitter, but I suspect you may need to look at young ladies from well-off families who were in Paris in the late 20s/early 30s and who had some connection with the EFDSS. There's probably a lot as women were very prominent in the Society from the start.

The paintings that are reference in the comment above were included in the original posting of this discussion, in the last attachment.

I don't think you can blame anyone for missing those, Kieran: it was an exceptionally long and dense introduction, with an awful lot of attachments! I was skimming by the end, and I certainly missed them...and in fact I still can't see the Caroline Bancroft one, which is I think the most like our sitter.

I agree with all of what Mark says, especially his view that it's unlikely (though not impossible) that Janet Harlan sat for the man who'd deserted her three years earlier, and who she'd only just divorced. I would also expand on his idea that Trubee may have had a tendency to paint women who looked, or were made to look somewhat alike. Many people are sexually / emotionally attracted to a particular physical 'type', and have serial lovers / partners who conform to it: it wouldn't surprise me if Janet's replacement (if there was one) looked rather like her, though of course I have no evidence for it. Certainly it's no less likely a scenario than that his recently-ex wife sat for him; and though the likeness to the 1923 photograph is pretty good, I wouldn't call it conclusive by a long chalk - one can excuse the over-sized eyes, narrower chin and slightly fuller lips of the 1925 image, as it's clearly a photo of another portrait.

I fear this one's going to be hard to nail unless the Collection (or the back of the picture) can reveal more.

Janet F(lagg)** Harlan remarried on 26 August 1931 at Kingman, Arizona, which must reduce still further (though not eliminate completely) the chances that she sat to her ex-husband the same year. She was then living in Riverside, California (50 miles or so east of LA), and her second husband Walter H Stevenson was just 21 - she unsurprisingly knocked a few years off her own age ("25" last birthday - she was actually 10 days short of 29). She married a third time in 1937. See https://bit.ly/3FroLhH and attached.

(**Flagg was her mother's maiden name)

Do we know what the green material wrapped around her left wrist represents?

If this is Harlan in 1931, the failure of her first marriage must have hardened and embittered her considerably, or so it looks.

Janet might have met Walter H. Stevenson during her stay in Reno while waiting for her divorce from Trubee:

http://renodivorcehistory.org/wp-content/uploads/imported-library/2008-09-002.pdf (search for Harlan)

Some results are also to be found by searching for "Janet Harlan White".

In response to Howard Jones, I am not "pouring cold water on the question whether painted portraits can help with establishing the sitters identity" .
I believe that they can.
I am also very much aware of the reasons why two portraits of the same person may be MEASURABLY quite different.
And of the fact that some artists, Peter Lely, for example, overlaid a particular set of features on every female face he ever painted.
If an artist is really looking at the subject, and painting what they see, then, yes, the likeness to the sitter may be a very accurate record of their appearance.

Another photograph of Janet Flagg Harlan, from her passport application - of the 3rd October 1923, when she was 21 - to enable her to travel to Italy, Spain, England, Austria, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, is presented in the attached composite. She sailed to from New York to Europe on the S.S. Orduña on the 13th October 1923.

I get a very different feel from those two images, Kieran. If they are both Harlan, she was a different woman by 1931.

I cannot find any portrait paintings by Trubee except the ones referenced by Mark Wilson. Those paintings look a very different style and dare I say, by a very talented person.The Trubee signature is similar to our painting here.Hmn!??? ---Here for comparison is an english painting of a similar date and style of Lady Mary Pakenham.
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/lady-mary-pakenham-133129/search/venue:southampton-city-art-gallery-4670/sort_by/date_earliest/order/asc/page/16

Louis, are you suggesting that the portrait is not by Trubee, despite the near-identical signatures?

I think I have identified the sitter. Baba Beaton-- or Mrs Alec Hambro-- also the sister of Cecil Beaton.Socially she would fit very nicely. See this painting by George Spencer Watson.
https://www.artrenewal.org/artworks/portrait-of-miss-beaton/george-spencer-watson/50728
also NPG.
https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw66262/Baba-Beaton?LinkID=mp63300&role=sit&rNo=1
Her sister Nancy is very similar,but I think ,not our sitter.
https://www.mediastorehouse.co.uk/topfoto/fashionistas/miss-nancy-beaton-engaged-sir-hugh-smiley-11002961.html

In 1931, Barbara 'Baba' Beaton was 19. Is this the portrait of a 19-year-old girl.

She also most often distinctively parted her hair from left to right, which this sitter does not do so. obviously.

Nor do I believe that the profile of our sitter matches that of either of the Beaton sisters, especially when a comparison is made between our sitter's slightly up-turned and pointed nose and those softly rounded ones of the Beatons.

The eyebrows are also different, and our sitter certainly does not look 19 (or 22, which was Nancy Beaton's age in 1931).

I've asked the collection again if they could possibly check the back of the picture now and look into how it was acquired.

The Library and Archives Director has replied that since we were last in contact the collection has looked into this quite extensively but there are no records on provenance or any further details. It's only relatively recently that accessions have been recorded systematically, and this must have come into the collection quite a long time before that.