In the Luxembourg Gardens

Setting out to establish himself as a portrait painter with an international clientele, John Singer Sargent developed a style that was necessarily more conservative but more ostentatious technically than the avante-garde productions of his contemporaries, the Impressionists. In the Luxembourg Gardens, set in Paris's largest urban park, is one of the few landscapes from his early career. It shares the Impressionists' interest in the effects of light and color at a specific time of day and in everyday, middle-class subjects. Yet by scrubbing in the thin paint to create the opalescent areas of color for sky, gravel paving, and stone architecture at twilight and the dark, billowing forms of trees, Sargent created a study in tone and atmosphere more akin to the carefully adjusted harmonies of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Each person, no matter how sketchy or distant, is characterized with a portraitist's eye for distinctive posture and attitude, and the touches of glowing color that define people and flowers are applied with a brio very different from an Impressionist's uninflected stroke. (Darrel Sewell, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 289.) [source]

John G. Johnson Collection, 1917