용연향의 연기

In the winter of 1879 John Singer Sargent, barely 23 and still making his name in Paris, sailed to Tangier and rented a house with a courtyard. He posed a model there against the whitewashed walls, then finished the canvas back in his Paris studio and sent it to the Salon of 1880. A woman lifts her robe to catch the perfumed smoke of ambergris, a waxy substance from whales burned as incense. The setting is a fantasy, stitched together from costumes and objects Sargent had gathered across North Africa, and no single room like it ever existed. He said plainly that the only thing that interested him in the picture was the color, and it shows in the near-white palette, warm smoke rising against pale stone.