Door of a Mosque

Sargent made his living from faces, and here he painted a crowd in which not one can be seen. The women crossing the paved court in front of this mosque door have white veils drawn over their faces and long cloaks of brown and grey wrapped round them, the way women in Turkish towns then dressed to go out. He sets them down in broad strokes, as patches of white and brown moving toward the dark doorway and away from it. The museum dates the canvas to about 1891, when his travels for the Boston library murals took him through Egypt, Greece and Turkey, but it does not name the mosque. The canvas is about 80 centimetres wide. Over the door runs a dark band of lettering picked out in gold.