Interpretive Resource

In 1884 John Singer Sargent unwittingly shocked the sophisticated Parisian public with a revealing portrait of the "professional beauty" Madame Pierre Gautreau, identified only as Madame X (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). However, just when hostile criticism threatened Sargent’s nascent career as a portraitist in France, several important commissions from British clients prompted him to move to England. There, he joined a small but stimulating group of like-minded American expatriates, including painters Edwin Austin Abbey and Francis David Millet, and the writer Henry James. His new circle of friends had established an artists’ colony in the village of Broadway in Worcestershire, and Sargent regularly joined them to spend the summers between 1885 and 1889. During that time, his interests shifted from portraiture to landscape, and he executed a number of fresh, natural studies in the open air, including Thistles.

Sargent had worked en plein air during sketching trips to Brittany in the late 1870s. Claude Monet’s daring optical studies of light and color, which Sargent encountered in Paris, so deeply impressed him that he later declared to a friend that the French artist’s achievements "bowled me over." In the countryside around Broadway, Sargent made his own observations, often looking so closely at his subject that the result is almost an abstraction of the natural world. In Thistles he rendered pale stalks and delicate grasses in a tracery-like pattern against a sienna-brown earth. Although Sargent also painted the leisure activities of the Broadway community—including boating parties and sketching trips—in his landscapes and nature studies, he gave his visual impressions primacy over subject matter. Through this shift of emphasis, Sargent enriched his palette and gained the bravura command that was to characterize his mature portrait work