Lady in the Alps Reading (The Cashmere Shawl)

Over the years, many critics have noted Sargent's seemingly effortless ability to paint a wide range of subjects in watercolor. Evan Charteris, the artist's friend and early biographer, remarked on the startling sense of spontaneity in these works: "They have a happy air of impromptu," he wrote, "of the artist having come upon a scene at a particular moment and there and then translated it into paint. He set his face against anything like 'picture-making;' his watercolors are fragmentary--pieces of the visible world broken off because they appealed to his eye. His power is displayed in the supremacy of his drawing, the opulence of his colour, the skill of his statement, finite as it often is, and the glowing warmth of his sunlit scenes. And in these he excels, not so much by the subtlety of his omissions as by the harmony of his assertions and his exuberant objectivity." (John Sargent, New York, 1927, p. 224).

This watercolor will be included in the forthcoming John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonné by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, in collaboration with Warren Adelson and Elizabeth Oustinoff.