The Winds

Once the dome was finished, the trustees asked Sargent to carry on down the main staircase, and at his request the stair hall itself was redesigned, its ceiling, skylight and walls reshaped to give him surfaces worth painting. The Winds is one of the canvases set into that ceiling vault, more than seven metres long and meant to be seen from below by people climbing the stairs. The winds of Greek myth appear as figures in the air. Sargent painted it, like the rest, on canvas in his studios in Boston and London, and it was then fixed to the vault. The colours of the staircase paintings are noticeably stronger than the soft ochre, blue and cream of the dome he had finished a few years earlier. It was painted between 1922 and 1925, and the staircase paintings were unveiled in November 1925, seven months after his death.