Horses at Palma
This conversation is connected to Horses at Palma.
Sargent painted Horses at Palma in 1908, during a visit to Majorca. A group of horses — white, gray, brown — stand packed together in what appears to be a yard or market, painted in quick, thick strokes of oil on a small panel. The background is barely articulated, just a pale scumble of white and lavender. Sargent was one of the most successful portrait painters of his generation, but he increasingly resented the constraints of commissioned work and spent more and more time on these kinds of informal studies made while traveling. He painted horses throughout his career, from Jerusalem to the Alps, always with the same interest in their massed forms and the way light moved across grouped bodies.