John Singer Sargent - The Sketchers [c.1913]

This quintessential Impressionist studio scene is believed to portray Wilfred Gabriel de Glehn and his wife, Jane (or possibly their friend Mary Foote) working outdoors in September 1913 near Lake Garda in San Vigilio, Italy, where they had joined Sargent's entourage. Detached from the claims of mundane existence, they are absorbed in painting from nature. The Sketchers describes a genteel existence that would be forever altered by the social and political changes wrought by World War I. In Sargent's account of sunlit San Vigilio, there is no premonition of the guns of August 1914 at Sarajevo and no acknowledgment of the radical changes in art that were already challenging the practice of painting American stories. Created thirty-five years after Sargent first embraced Impressionism; The Sketchers demonstrates the durability of nineteenth-century styles and narrative devices.

[Oil on canvas, 55.9 x 71.1 cm]