Neapolitan Children Bathing

Sargent was 23 and had never set foot in the United States. Born in Florence to American parents who moved between rented rooms in Italy and France, he had just come out of Carolus-Duran's studio in Paris, and in 1879 he sent this small beach scene to the National Academy of Design in New York. It was one of the first pictures his countrymen saw by him. He had worked it up from pencil sketches and oil studies made in southern Italy the summer before. A boy with a float strapped round him looks out to sea, where a swimmer's head shows above the water, and the shallows are laid in as thin washes of blue and green with the sand in thicker strokes. The New York reviewers called it delightful and sparkling.