Pagan Deities

Around 1892 Sargent was deep in his first great public commission, murals on the history of religion for the new Boston Public Library. He painted them in England, in a large studio at Fairford in Gloucestershire, at the house of the American painter Edwin Austin Abbey, who had his own commission for the same building. This long, narrow strip of canvas, worked in pencil and oil, belongs to his planning for the ancient gods that open the cycle at the north end of the library's gallery. There the goddess Neith, mother of the universe in Sargent's scheme, stretches her body across the whole vault, the god Moloch wears a crown of the sun whose rays end in hands, and Astarte stands on a crescent moon. In the library itself he built much of this up in raised relief and set metal and glass into Astarte's robes to catch the light. The north end was installed in Boston in 1895.