NARRATOR: A woman perfumes herself by burning ambergris: a waxy substance from sperm whales that’s used ritually in some cultures. It’s another of Sargent’s “travel paintings,” inspired by a trip to Tangier in 1880. This scene is also a masterful study in the subtleties of white. Artist Elizabeth Colomba:

ELIZABETH COLOMBA: What I love about it is: different types of whites everywhere!

So, you have the whites of the architecture, you have the white of the veil, you have the white of the sleeves, and you have the white of this beautiful silver pendant.

Sargent challenged himself to be able to paint white in different shades, which is a very hard thing to do.

It’s difficult because there’s never only white in white. There’s blues. There are purples. There could be yellow. There could be all these shades, and you will still be white.

NARRATOR: “Travel” paintings like this were designed to appeal to contemporary tastes for the “exotic.” Sargent crafted the scene from studies and sketches he made in Tangier, completing the final image in his Paris studio.

COLOMBA: He is putting together an idea of what is Tangier for you as a viewer.

He takes it more as a symbol of a country and removes the idea that there’s a real person behind it. So, it becomes now a symbol of that place.

People who were natives of North African countries all of a sudden became extras in their own world.

NARRATOR: Between the Franco-Moroccan war of 1844 and the French colonization of Morocco in 1904, French audiences were eager for images of this distant land. This type of exoticizing image based on studies made abroad but reimagined for a curious public were popular at the Salon. Fumée d'ambre gris garnered significant praise in 1880, further boosting Sargent’s career.