An Artist in His Studio

Early in 1905 the Museum of Fine Arts had just set up a fund for buying the work of living artists, and its director, Edward Robinson, wanted this picture to be the first thing it bought. He had seen it when he called on Sargent in London. Sargent had painted it the previous August at Purtud, a hamlet in the Italian Alps, where his friend the Italian painter Ambrogio Raffele had turned a cramped hotel bedroom into a studio. Raffele is squeezed into the corner with a fistful of brushes and a palette crusted with paint, working up a sunny landscape indoors among his small sketches, while his straw hat and shirt lie thrown across the unmade bed. When the picture was shown in London in November 1904, the critic of The Times wrote that surely tumbled white sheets had never been painted like that before. Sargent's own nickname for the canvas was No Nonsense. The museum bought it in May 1905, and Robinson cabled the painter to confirm. Museum will take no nonsense from you, the cable read. It was the first of Sargent's paintings other than a portrait to enter an American museum.