Collections: American Art: An Out-of-Doors Study

• Download
• Add to set
• Favorite
• Posse icon
• Share
• Print

An Out-of-Doors Study

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.


• Artist: John Singer Sargent, American, 1856-1925
• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Dates: 1889
• Dimensions: 25 15/16 x 31 3/4 in. (65.9 x 80.7 cm) Frame: 41 1/2 x 48 5/8 x 6 in. (105.4 x 123.5 x 15.2 cm)
• Signature: Signed lower right: "John S. Sargent"
• Collections: American Art
• Museum Location: This item is on view in American Identities: A New Look, Expanding Horizons, 5th Floor
• Accession Number: 20.640
• Credit Line: Museum Collection Fund
• Image: Overall, 20.640_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925). An Out-of-Doors Study, 1889. Oil on canvas, 25 15/16 x 31 3/4 in. (65.9 x 80.7 cm) Frame: 41 1/2 x 48 5/8 x 6 in. (105.4 x 123.5 x 15.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 20.640 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 20.640_SL1.jpg)