Brooklyn Museum: Collections: American Art

John Singer Sargent: An Out-of Doors Study (Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife)

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). An Out-of-Doors Study (Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife), 1889. Oil on canvas, 25 15/16 x 31 3/4 in. (65.9 x 80.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 20.640

A leader among late nineteenth-century society portrait painters, John Singer Sargent also painted compelling landscape and figure subjects, including this image of his friend Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) and his wife, Alice. An Out-of-Doors Study was the product of one of Sargent's extended visits to the Broadway artists' colony in the Cotswolds, England, where he experimented with plein-air (out-of-doors) work and a freer, Impressionist-inspired technique. Although he employed loose, lively brushwork throughout the image, Sargent carefully orchestrated the picture, employing a firm compositional structure of converging diagonal lines: the canoe, pole, canvas edge, and figural forms. Having begun the painting out-of-doors, he undoubtedly finished it in his studio, where he probably referred to a photograph of the couple similarly posed. His cropping of forms at the picture's edge adds to the modern, "snapshot" quality of the image.

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