American Art Collaborative

Before entering the collections of the Walters Art Museum, this watercolor had last been publically exhibited at the Sargent memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy, London in 1926. Sargent was probably the most distinguished late 19th-century artist of American descent. This watercolor is one of the artist's earliest. Sargent would win particular renown for working in this medium in the last two decades of his life. The Walter's watercolor is presumed to have been painted in the fall of 1870 during Sargent's second trip to Spain. The journey, which was motivated by the young artist's desire to study the paintings of Velasquez, resulted in the production of some of his early masterpieces, most notably the celebrated "El Jaleo" (1882), a painting of a Spanish dancer now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. The subject of the Walter's picture is a vase in the Garden of the Andarves in the Alhambra Palace, placed there in the reign of Muhammad V (1354-91). For over four centuries the Alhambra vases were objects of admiration for travelers because of their marvelous cobalt blue and golden lustre and their unusual size. In 17th century accounts there were at least three vases, but by the time Sargent visited only one was intact. This is now in the Museo Arqueologico de la Alhambra. Although painted with considerable freedom, Sargent's watercolor is an accurate rendering, showing the antelope and tree-of-life motifs and even the puddle of glaze on the collar of the vessel. The Walters does not possess a vase similar to this, however, there is a fragmentary example in the Freer-Sackler Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., which was discovered by the Spanish painter, Mariano Fortuny, in a tavern of the Albaicín, Granada.