The Black Brook

Sargent was trained to be an Old Master. The Old Master style works from halftones backward to darks and forward to lights which, against the somber tonalities of the canvas, acquire a diamantine luminescence. Think, for example, of Rembrandt, in whose paintings a metaphysically brilliant light splits darkness like a sword and at the same time vests forms with such radiance that it is as though they were redeemed by some holy intervention and touched with grace. Each canvas executes a metaphor of redemption from shadow to light, as if the biblical moment when darkness was lifted from the face of the waters were miraculously reenacted in each biblical scene Rembrandt painted. Even secular scenes take on a kind of biblical intensity. 

The same amazing light defines special forms against the surrounding darknesses in the painting of Velázquez, and it was Velázquez above all whom Sargent, like the other students in the atelier of the fashionable portraitist Carolus-Duran, was encouraged to emulate. The girl seated in the foreground of this painting is the artist's niece, Rose Marie Ormond, daughter of Mrs Francis Ormond and later wife of Robert Michel. She appears with her sister, Reine Ormond (Mrs Hugo Pitman), in another painting, "The Brook," in which they are dressed in Oriental costume. The site in both pictures is almost identical: a mountain stream at the Chalets de Purtud, near Courmayeur, Val d'Aosta — just southwest of Mont Blanc and almost 5,000 ft. above sea level. 

Have a great and calm Monday!