Cosmopolitan and Candid Stories, 1877–1915

John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925)
Mosquito Nets, 1908
Oil on canvas; 22 1/2 x 28 1/4 in. (57.2 x 71.8 cm)
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, and Founders Society Acquisition Funds (1993.18)
Photograph © 1993 The Detroit Institute of Arts

After 1900, no longer bound to his London portrait studio, Sargent traveled extensively, usually in the company of family members and friends. In September 1908 he made his second visit to Majorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands off the eastern coast of Spain, a place not yet touched by tourism. There, in the dim interior of their rented apartment in a villa in Valldemosa, he portrayed his older sister Emily sitting in a cushioned wooden chair and their friend Eliza Wedgwood reclining on a sofa. Absorbed in their reading, both women are further sheltered by contraptions that Sargent labeled garde mangers—mosquito nets that Emily had contrived from large hoops and black netting. In spirit as well as structure, such an enigmatic, intimate, informally constructed scene is a world apart from declamatory mid-century depictions of men reading in pursuit of information.