A celebrated portraitist of high society, John Singer Sargent depicted the cosmopolitan world to which he belonged with elegance and verve. Born in Italy to a wealthy American expatriate couple, Sargent spent most of his career abroad. He developed his acclaimed, fluid technique in the Parisian studio of portrait painter Charles Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran and was deeply influenced by the breathtaking brushwork of both the Spanish Baroque master Diego Velázquez and the nineteenth-century French painter Edouard Manet. By the age of twenty-three, Sargent was already exhibiting his work at the official Paris Salon.

Considering London his home after the mid-1880s, the peripatetic artist made frequent sojourns to sunny locales to master the effects of outdoor painting. Joining Sargent on an autumn holiday to Italy in 1907 were fellow artists from the United States, Wilfrid and Jane Emmet von Glehn. One of their stops was Villa Torlonia in Frascati, a popular hillside resort near Rome. Sargent painted this charming portrait of the von Glehns in the villa’s elaborately landscaped gardens. One of the artist’s most accomplished informal, outdoor portraits, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy celebrates the act of painting. Not only did Sargent show Jane von Glehn creating her own picture, but the sun-drenched setting enabled him to employ thick impasto and virtuoso brushwork to indicate the play of bright light on a variety of textures: he even captured the way spray issues from a fountain by dragging a dry brush across the canvas. The work’s fresh and spontaneous quality belies the artist’s careful orchestrating of the von Glehns’ poses, so that figures, architecture, and landscape—as well as light and shade—are perfectly balanced.