A Capriote

Painters had been coming to Capri, in the Bay of Naples, for most of the 19th century, for the light, the coast and the people, and in August 1878 Sargent, aged 22, spent his summer there. An English painter, Frank Hyde, lent him his studio in Santa Teresa, an abandoned monastery, and his model too. She was Rosina Ferrara, about 17, from Anacapri, and Sargent's first biographer described her nut-brown complexion and mass of blue-black hair. Here she leans into the crooked trunk of an olive tree, one arm hooked over a branch and her head turned down over her shoulder, so that her body follows the twist of the wood, with thistles in the grass at her feet. Sargent painted the composition three times. This is the first version, and the canvas still carries traces of his underdrawing and of changes to her pose and to the fall of her skirt. Another version went to the Paris Salon of 1879, where it was caricatured as Laocoön, the Trojan priest who in the ancient statue wrestles with giant serpents. This one went to New York and was bought there that spring by Ichabod Williams, a lumber merchant who collected French painting.