In 1929, Chicago artist Ivan Albright placed an advertisement for a model, which was answered by Ida Rogers, not yet twenty years old. The artist painted the young wife and mother— “a very decent girl,” claimed Albright— throughout the next two years, metamorphosing her on canvas into the stereotype of a piteous older woman we see in this early masterpiece of 1929–1930. Her puckered, drooping flesh squeezed into tawdry clothing sizes too small, the doleful woman sits alone at her dressing table, surrounded by a collection of objects as wasted and worn as she is. She gazes at a mirror held at such an angle that it could reflect either her sorrowful image or the empty void behind her. As if the powder puff could ward off the ravages of time, she dabs at her gray, sagging flesh in vain. To render this haunting portrait of aging and decay, Albright used lurid, dark colors, illuminated by a harsh, raking light that accentuates each blemish, each stray hair.
Albright transformed his subject according to his personal artistic vision. He was interested in manipulating the appear- ance of his sitter and setting. Thus the perspective of the rug and dresser tilt perilously to the right in the picture, while the checkered handkerchief seems to hover in midair. Albright’s simultaneous presentation of different vantage points not only increases the viewer’s discomfort, it also underscores Albright’s central theme and lifelong fascination: the pre- cariousness of life and death and decay’s inevitability. In Ida, Albright has portrayed a modern-day vanitas figure sur- rounded by objects symbolizing this very impermanence—a mirror, flowers, money, an extinguished match. “The tomorrow of death is what appeals to me,” declared Albright in one of his many notebooks. “It is greater than life—stronger than any human ties.”
As for the real Ida Rogers, the painting reveals little. In front of the left chair leg is a peanut shell. Rogers munched peanuts during sittings, perhaps to relieve the tedium, a habit that infuriated the artist. Behind the chair is a burnt scrap of paper. Although scrolls are often found in traditional vanitas paint- ings, this singed sheet may refer to a poem the single artist (he did not marry until 1946) had written during the intense paint- ing sessions.

Source- http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/resources/Rsrc_001112.pdf