Горный ручей

Sargent gave up commissioned oil portraits in 1907, at the height of the trade, and after that his summers went into watercolour. He travelled with family and friends into the Alps and the Dolomites, set himself up under an umbrella beside whatever was in front of him, and worked fast. He painted a great many streams. This one is unusual for having a person in it, a bather on the rocks, which ties it to a particular day rather than to water in general. He made it somewhere between 1912 and 1914, and in the summer of 1914 the war caught him on a painting trip in the Austrian Tyrol, where he was stuck for months before he could get home. The Metropolitan bought ten of his exhibition watercolours, this one among them, straight from the artist in 1915.