Thistles is an exceptional example of John Singer Sargent’s work en plein air and was probably painted between 1885 and 1889 during one of the artist’s regular outdoor sketching excursions in the Worcestershire region of England. Sargent’s trips to Worcestershire began after he took up residence in London following the scandalous exhibition of Madame X (1884; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in Paris in 1884. Another expatriate American, Edwin Austin Abbey, introduced Sargent to Worcestershire in September 1885 when they traveled together to Broadway, a Cotswolds town where artists such as Francis David Millet and Edwin Howland Blashfield had formed an artists’ colony.

The pastel-hued stalks of Thistles criss-cross in a delicate grid that captures an abstract aspect of the natural world. At first, this composition appears uncharacteristic of the works Sargent produced during his summers and autumns in the English countryside, many of which depict boating parties, women with parasols, and friends at work on their own plein-air paintings. Indeed, a well-known and typical Sargent painting from this period, Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife (1889; Brooklyn Museum of Art), shows a couple languidly seated among the reeds by a stream. Close examination, however, reveals similarities between the palette, staccato brushstrokes, and emphasis on grasses and greenery in the two works.

Though painted two decades later, Sargent’s The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy shares an important kinship with Thistles; both paintings celebrate plein-air painting excursions. The Fountain, however, is a more aesthetically complex work that integrates figures into a richly rendered landscape. Completed in Italy during an autumn holiday, the canvas documents a painting excursion Sargent and his close friends Jane and Wilfrid von Glehn took to the famous Villa Torlonia in Frascati, located about fifteen miles southeast of Rome. The party traveled there in October 1907, and all three painted scenes of the villa’s elaborately landscaped grounds.

After 1906 Sargent decreased his production of portraits and concentrated largely on works such as The Fountain that combine informal, intimate portraiture with light-saturated, impressionistic landscapes. However much he intended this work to convey spontaneity, Jane von Glehn’s description of posing for it suggests a very different atmosphere: "Sargent is doing a most amusing and killingly funny picture in oils of me perched on a balustrade painting. It is the very ‘spit’ of me. He has stuck Wilfrid in looking at my sketch with rather a contemptuous expression. . . . Poor Wilfrid can’t pose for more than a few minutes at a time as the position is torture after a while." The painting was composed over several days that were frequently interrupted by rain, and thus it was a composite creation. Evidently Sargent’s impulses as a portrait painter continued to guide his approach to painting, which included multiple sittings, contrived poses, and appropriate props. The Fountain is distinguishable from Sargent’s earlier indoor portraits, such as Mrs. George Swinton (Elizabeth Ebsworth), however, by the Impressionist effects, such as that of the play of bright sunlight on a variety of surfaces, that suggest the artist’s prowess with rich, rapid, painterly execution. The von Glehns and the plume of water behind them comprise a study of whites set off by the deep green of the dense trees and the variegated browns and grays of the architectural details. A later, more matter-of-fact canvas shows both Jane and Wilfrid painting out-of-doors absorbed in their work. The Sketchers, however, is a spontaneously produced landscape study and does not represent the same complex narrative as does the Art Institute’s painting.

Sargent’s attraction to Italy as a subject dates back to his earliest years as a painter and continued into his final years. The works he created at the Villa Torlonia, a highly regarded example of landscape and villa architecture, link Sargent and his subjects to a long tradition of American artists who traveled to Italy to bask in the glow of its history. Although Jane von Glehn had hoped that Wilfred would purchase The Fountain, Sargent instead sent it off for exhibition, first at the New English Art Club, in 1907, and then to The Art Institute of Chicago, in January 1914, where it was purchased by the Friends of American Art for the permanent collection.