Gourds

Sargent’s extraordinary virtuosity is on display in Gourds, painted in Majorca in the summer or autumn of 1908, just months before the New York debut of his watercolors. In all of his garden watercolors, Sargent relied on the pictorial framework of sculptural forms to anchor his exuberant record of vivid light falling across leaves and flowers. Here the fruits, made luminous with thin washes and exposed areas of paper, punctuate a maze of layered colors and whorls of dashed, opaque highlights.