Claude Monet peignant à la lisière d'un bois

By 1885 John Singer Sargent was a fashionable portrait painter, but here he set that aside to watch a friend work. He had gone out to Giverny, where Claude Monet was living, and painted him at his easel in the open air, the way Monet insisted a landscape had to be done, in front of the thing itself. Behind Monet a woman sits in the grass, waiting, one of his household keeping him company through the long hours outdoors. Sargent caught the ordinary reality of it, the folded legs, the patience, the painter half-buried in the field he was recording. For a while afterwards Sargent loosened his own brushwork and tried painting outdoors like this himself.