Gitana

Artist:: John Singer Sargent (American, Florence 1856–1925 London)

Date:: 1876 (?)

Medium:: Oil on canvas

Dimensions:: 29 x 23 5/8 in. (73.7 x 60 cm)

Classification:: Paintings

Credit Line:: Gift of George A. Hearn, 1910

Accession Number:: 10.64.10

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 774

Sargent arrived in Paris in 1874 and enrolled in the teaching studio of the portraitist Carolus-Duran, a friend of Edouard Manet and the Impressionists. Under Carolus's influence, Sargent participated in the prevailing Parisian enthusiasm for Spain and things Spanish. He probably made this softly rendered dramatically illuminated portrait study of a gitana (Spanish for gypsy) during his student years in Paris. The painting is the only work by Sargent given to the Metropolitan by George A. Hearn, a trustee and the Museum's most important donor of American paintings in the early twentieth century.

Signature: [at upper center]: John S. Sargent

probably Alfred Philippe Roll, Paris, by 1896; with J. Chaine and Simonson, France, 1909; with M. Knoedler and Company, New York, 1909; George A. Hearn, New York, 1909–1910

Essays
America Comes of Age: 1876–1900
American Impressionism
Americans in Paris, 1860–1900
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Nineteenth–Century American Drawings

Timelines
The United States and Canada, 1800–1900 A.D.

American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent
American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864
"John Singer Sargent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 57, no. 4 (Spring, 2000)

Department

American Paintings and Sculpture (5,341)

Artist / Maker / Culture

John Singer Sargent (662)

Object Type / Material

Canvas (4,804)

Oil paintings (3,010)

Paintings (13,168)

Geographic Location