Bus Horses in Jerusalem
This conversation is connected to Bus Horses in Jerusalem.
John Singer Sargent painted Bus Horses in Jerusalem in 1905, during a trip to the Middle East. It's a watercolor — a row of working horses seen from behind, their backs and flanks rendered in overlapping washes of blue, ochre, and warm brown. Sargent chose the angle deliberately, interested in the repeating forms of multiple backs rather than a single animal in profile. The painting is now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which acquired it directly from Sargent in 1907 for forty pounds. Sargent produced over two thousand watercolors across his career, many of them made on his constant travels, and they tend to be looser and more experimental than his commissioned oil portraits.