Reapers Resting in a Wheat Field

In the summer of 1885, Sargent was recovering from a very public humiliation. The year before, his portrait of Madame Gautreau had scandalized the Paris Salon, and the commissions he had counted on dried up. He crossed to England and settled for a while at Broadway, a village in the Cotswolds where English and American artists had gathered. This field of resting harvesters comes out of those months. He was painting outdoors in the hot midday light rather than working for a paying sitter, and the reapers sit in a loose semicircle with their sickles stuck in the ground. Look at his brushwork and you will see it curve like those blades through the standing wheat. He came back to the same village the next summer to finish Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.