Head of an Arab

In 1891 Sargent was gathering faces. The trustees of Boston's new public library had commissioned murals from him on the history of religion, and the first part, unveiled in 1895, would include a long frieze of the Hebrew prophets. On his travels that year he made oil studies of people he met, and this is one of them. The man wears a white turban and an open white robe. His face is fully worked, the skin built up in warm browns, the grey beard brought down to a single twisted wisp below the lip, his eyes turned aside. Everything else is left at the first stage, a few strokes for the robe, a patch of grey behind the head, and bare canvas showing all round the edges. The title calls him only an Arab, and no name was written down. Nobody knows whether Sargent used this face for one of the prophets. The canvas is 80 centimetres high, and it stayed with the artist until his death.