Science

Science is the right-hand one of three panels Sargent painted for a single wall of the museum's main staircase, which is why the photograph of that wall shows it on the right, beside The Unveiling of Truth. It is about two metres tall. Two figures look upward. In front sits a bald old man, bare to the waist, with a pale cloak gathered over his knees. Behind him a younger face in a blue headcloth turns the same way. Above them a raised hand holds a pair of compasses against a curve of dark blue sky scattered with stars. Compasses of this kind were the tool astronomers and mapmakers used to measure distances on a globe or a chart. A charcoal study for the figure shows the hand and the compasses a second time, drawn as a separate detail at the side of the sheet. Behind the figures runs the gold ground with a criss-cross pattern that Sargent used across this wall. He painted the canvas between 1922 and 1925 and signed it with his initials, J S S, at the lower left.