In the Luxembourg Gardens

In 1879 John Singer Sargent was 23 and still making his name in Paris, and the Luxembourg Gardens lay a short walk from his studio. He painted them at dusk, the hour when the crowds thin and the lamps are about to be lit. A fashionable couple stands in the foreground, close together and somehow apart. The man draws on a cigarette and looks off to one side while the woman gazes down, and neither seems to be speaking. Behind them a wide gravel walk runs back toward a fountain, and a thin moon has already risen in a sky still holding the last blue of the day. Sargent kept the palette low and grey, letting the pale dress and the light gravel catch what glow remains. He returned to this same twilight garden more than once. A second version of it now hangs in Minneapolis.