A Gust of Wind (Judith Gautier)

In the mid-1880s Sargent stepped away from the Paris studio and spent his summers painting outdoors, often in England, testing what the Impressionists were doing with sunlight and broken colour. This picture comes from those years. The woman is Judith Gautier, a writer in her own right and the daughter of the poet Theophile Gautier, caught in the open as a gust of wind pulls at her pale dress and the grass around her. Nothing is posed. Sargent lets the brushwork stay loose and rapid, chasing the movement of the cloth and the light rather than a careful likeness. It sits closer to a landscape with a figure in it than to the commissioned portraits that were starting to make him rich. The exact year is uncertain, and scholars place it somewhere in the middle of the decade.