The Unveiling of Truth

In a charcoal sketch for this panel, Sargent drew a single kneeling figure holding up a veil so thin you could see through it, and left it unclear whether the figure was a man or a woman, ancient or modern. In the painting he finished between 1922 and 1925 he added a second figure, a young man kneeling with his back to us, who lifts the heavy blue cloth with both arms. This is the middle one of three panels on the same wall, with Philosophy on one side and Science on the other, and above them Sargent placed the daughters of Danaus with their water jars and Atlas bearing the world. The museum reads the whole wall as a picture of the search for truth as hard, often punishing work that never quite comes to an end. Sargent signed this canvas with his initials only, J S S, low on the left.