Carrara: Wet Quarries

In 1911 the marble quarries in the mountains above Carrara were still worked largely by hand. Men split the white stone with hammers and wedges, brought down whole faces of rock with explosive charges, and sent the blocks down to the coast and on by sea to sculptors and builders across Europe and America. Sargent went up among them that year with his watercolours. Here the floor of a quarry is a jumble of cut and broken blocks. In the foreground a workman in a broad hat leans over one with a tool in his raised hand, and another man stoops among the stones behind him. Sargent signed the sheet at the lower left, John S. Sargent. The Museum of Fine Arts keeps a run of these Carrara sheets, and their titles read like a field notebook, Quarry I, Quarry II, In a Quarry, and one named for the man who owned the working, Monsieur Derville. This title adds a single word, wet.