The Master and His Pupils

The man at the easel is Adrian Stokes, an English landscape painter, and the three young women gathered round him are the pupils of the title. All three were posed by the same person, the maid of Stokes's wife, the painter Marianne Stokes. The couple were travelling with Sargent in the Austrian Tyrol in the summer of 1914, on one of several mountain sketching holidays the three of them took together. Sargent set the little group at the edge of a forest and gave more than half of the canvas to the rocks in the foreground. The title sends the eye back to the figures, and slyly leaves open which painter here is the master. In January 1915 Sargent sold the picture to the dealers Knoedler for 200 pounds, a little under 1,000 dollars at the time. Fifteen months later they sold it for 6,000 dollars to Arthur Marks, a rubber executive from Akron, Ohio, and in 1922 the Museum of Fine Arts paid 9,500.