Dolce Far Niente

Sargent collected clothes on his journeys through the Middle East, and from September 1905 to January 1906 he had been back there, riding through Palestine and Syria to gather material for the murals he was painting for the Boston Public Library. Robes, shawls and headdresses went home in trunks. Around 1907 those trunks turned up in the Italian Alps, at Purtud in the Val d'Aosta, where he spent part of every summer from 1904 to 1908 with family and friends. So here are his travelling companions, lying by a mountain stream in Turkish costume. The title is an Italian phrase, the sweetness of doing nothing. The paint is laid on thick, and the folds of cloth turn into broad patches of white, green and blue. The men were probably all posed by one person, Sargent's Italian manservant Nicola d'Inverno. On the right, a chessboard sits on the grass between two of the figures, the only occupation anyone has.