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An Out-of-Doors Study

John Singer Sargent

American Art

In the late 1880s, the American expatriate John Singer Sargent experimented with portrait compositions whose informality and naturalness stood in sharp contrast to his commissioned studio portraits of elegant society types. Inspired in part by the Impressionist works of his friend Claude Monet, this portrait depicts another French artist friend, Paul Helleu, and his young wife, Alice, at Fladbury, in England’s Cotswolds. Liberated from pictorial conventions, Sargent here featured the compositional asymmetry, natural light, and casual inattention of his “sitters.”
MEDIUM Oil on canvas
DATES 1889
DIMENSIONS frame: 41 1/2 x 48 5/8 x 6 in. (105.4 x 123.5 x 15.2 cm) 25 15/16 x 31 3/4 in. (65.9 x 80.7 cm)  (show scale)
SIGNATURE Signed lower right: "John S. Sargent"
COLLECTIONS American Art
ACCESSION NUMBER 20.640
CREDIT LINE Museum Collection Fund
MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
CAPTION John Singer Sargent (American, born Italy, 1856–1925). An Out-of-Doors Study, 1889. Oil on canvas, 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_PS6.jpg)
IMAGE overall, 20.640_PS6.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2012
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