Two Architectural Studies

In 1890 Sargent agreed to paint murals on the history of religion for the new Boston Public Library, his first great public commission, and early the next year he set off on a three-month journey to gather material for it, which took him on through Greece to Constantinople. The museum dates this canvas to about 1891. As its title says, it carries two separate architectural studies on a single piece of canvas. One of the oil sketches he made in Constantinople on that journey, of the interior of Santa Sofia, is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and it is almost exactly the same size as this canvas.