An Out-of-Doors Study

The man stretched out on the grass with a canvas is Paul Helleu, a French painter and close friend of Sargent's. The woman beside him is his wife, Alice. In the summer of 1889 the Helleus came to stay with Sargent in the English countryside at Fladbury, and he caught them like this, mid-outing, Helleu absorbed in his own open-air study. Sargent was in an experimental stretch just then. A few years after the scandal his portrait of Madame X had caused in Paris, he was spending less time on grand society commissions and more on informal work made outdoors. This one looks like pure spontaneity, though he most likely finished it in the studio, working partly from a photograph of the couple posed the same way.