Frieze of the Prophets

From 1895 the new Boston Public Library had a picture people wanted to take home. That year Sargent's Frieze of the Prophets went up at the north end of the third-floor gallery, the Hebrew prophets standing in groups along three walls and Moses at the centre, in raised relief, holding the tablets of the law. A Boston firm, Curtis and Cameron, photographed it and sold it as hand-tinted Copley Prints in five parts, and copies were framed far beyond Boston, one of them in a synagogue in Colorado Springs. This canvas comes from before all that, around 1892, while Sargent was still working out the figures in England. Five prophets crowd together. Their faces are little more than dark marks, and what he is really testing is cloth, a white mantle thrown over a head, a brown robe hanging heavy from the shoulders, a pale cloak edged in blue. One figure buries his face in his arm, another flings up a hand. The study stayed with Sargent until his death, and in 1937 his sister, Violet Ormond, gave it to the Museum of Fine Arts.