Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight

Sargent was born in Italy to American parents and spent most of his career in Europe. He executed this view of a fashionable park in summer twilight while completing his art studies in Paris. Like the young French Impressionists whose work he respected, Sargent sought to capture fleeting moments in urban settings, evoking movement and, here, the particular diffuse light of Paris at dusk. The delicate harmony of pearly gray and white combined with touches of vivid color are pure Sargent. The painter executed two versions of this subject. He sold the slightly more finished one (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), but gave this one to Charles Follen McKim, the famous architect; it is inscribed To my friend McKim. In his later years, Sargent could not recall in which order he executed the two paintings, but from certain subtle changes he thought perhaps the Minneapolis painting was first.