Tina Barney photographs the inner lives of New England society as a somewhat conspicuous insider. Her subjects are primarily family and friends, however her large-format 8 x 10 view camera could never take a fully unnoticed image, unlike Paul Strand’s trick prism lens. Barney captured the present image while attending a wedding reception at the Upper West Side home of Donald Stralem, a banker, and his wife Jean, a philanthropist and granddaughter of Philip Lehman, co-founder of Lehman Brothers investment bank. The Stralem’s held an exceptional collection of Impressionist paintings, including the Portrait d'Angel Fernández de Soto by Pablo Picasso prominently featured in Barney’s photograph. Flanking this famed Picasso, are two exquisite gems of nineteenth-century painting Édouard Manet’s 1880 Trois pommes and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s M. Fernand Corot, arrière-petit-neveu du peintre, à l'âge de 4 ans et demi, 1863. De Soto’s elongated features and semi-abstracted face quietly mirror those of the gloriously dressed woman captured in the center of Barney’s photograph, forming a chance dialogue between the two.