Sketch for Atlas and the Hesperides

In 1948 Thomas McKeller, the Boston elevator operator who had been Sargent's main model for the museum's murals, answered questions from a scholar gathering material on the painter. About one figure he wrote, Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, this was my body except my head. This is that body, worked out in oil over pencil between 1922 and 1924 for a round painting on a ceiling beside the grand staircase. Atlas kneels under the weight of the heavens, his head pressed down and almost hidden beneath it. Around him lie the Hesperides, the nymphs who kept a garden of golden apples at the western edge of the world, every one of them asleep. Behind him the sun is going down between two columns. McKeller was in his early thirties when he took that pose in Sargent's Boston studio. The finished canvas, about three metres across, went up in 1925.