Viana do Castelo, Portugal

In 1903 Sargent painted his friend Charles Martin Loeffler, a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a composer, as a birthday present for the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and that portrait still hangs in her museum. This watercolour, which the Museum of Fine Arts dates to about the same year, belonged to the Loefflers. It came to the museum in 1937 as a bequest from the composer's widow, Elise Fay Loeffler. The place is Viana do Castelo, a port in the north of Portugal at the mouth of the river Lima. Sargent drew the scene lightly in pencil and painted over it in transparent washes, with a few touches of opaque colour. A fortress wall closes the view on the right, boats are drawn up on the beach, and in the lower right corner two boys sit together.