Egyptians Raising Water from the Nile

Sargent painted this on a trip up the Nile in the winter of 1890 to 1891, though he wasn't there as a tourist. Boston had commissioned him to decorate its new public library with murals on the history of religion, and he went east to soak up the ancient world at its source. Between the research he kept painting whatever was in front of him. Here a man works a shaduf, a counterweighted pole for lifting river water that Egyptians had used since the age of the pharaohs, still doing the same job in Sargent's day. He catches the bent figures and the bright water in quick, loose strokes, a private study rather than a finished picture. It later went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.