Study from Life

In 1891 Sargent, already the most sought-after portraitist on both sides of the Atlantic, set his society commissions aside and travelled to Egypt looking for new material. In a rented studio in Cairo he painted this full-length figure of a young Egyptian woman, working slowly and carefully instead of with the quick, showy brush he used for his fashionable sitters. He modelled the flesh the way his old academic teachers had taught him, tone by tone. It is the only nude study of a woman he is known to have exhibited, and he sent it out widely: to the Salon in Paris in 1892 and then to the great World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago the following year, the city where it hangs today.