About the Artwork
The warm orange glow of the afternoon sun illuminates this scene, casting the long shadows of slender trees and a crumbling fence across the foreground. The American artist John Singer Sargent probably painted this in late autumn 1885 after he joined a lively group of artists in Broadway in the Cotswolds district of England. Sargent’s informal working habits, which produced strikingly immediate compositions like this, surprised his friends in that rural English village. The poet Edmund Gosse recorded that the painter wandered the fields, seemingly at random before stopping “nowhere in particular [. . .] the process was like that in the game of musical chairs.” Gosse explained that Sargent aimed “not to pick and choose” the most picturesque subject “but to render the effect before him, whatever it may be.”
Sargent inscribed the painting in red along the lower edge “to my friend Bramley,” the English painter Frank Bramley (1857 – 1915).
Home Fields
ca. 1885
John Singer Sargent
1856-1925
American
Unknown
Oil on canvas
Unframed: 28 3/4 × 38 inches (73 × 96.5 cm) Framed: 37 1/4 × 46 5/8 × 3 1/4 inches (94.6 × 118.4 × 8.3 cm)
Paintings
American Art before 1950
City of Detroit Purchase
21.72
Public Domain
Markings
Signed, lower left: To my friend Bramley | John S. Sargent
Inscribed, lower left: To my friend Bramley | John S. Sargent
Provenance
John Singer Sargent;until 1920, Frank Bramley (Worcestershire, England);
May 28, 1920, sale (Christie's, lot 131, London, England);
1920, lot 15064, M. Knoedler & Co. (New York, New York, USA).
May 1921, John Levy Galleries (New York, New York, USA);
1921-present, purchase by the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, Michigan, USA)
For more information on provenance, please visit:
Provenance pageExhibition History
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The exhibition history of a number of objects in our collection only begins after their acquisition by the museum, and may reflect an incomplete record.
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Burroughs, Clyde H. “Painting by Sargent Acquired.” Bulletin of the DIA 3, 1 (October 1921): pp. 4-6 (ill.).
Downes, William Howe. John S. Sargent: His Life and His Work. Boston, 1925, p. 138.
Charteris, Evan. John Sargent. London, 1927, pp. 84, 283.
Mount, Charles Merrill. John Singer Sargent: A Biography. New York, 1955, p. 445.
Mount, Charles Merrill. John Singer Sargent: A Biography. London, 1957, p. 355.
The Private World of John Singer Sargent. Exh. cat., Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 1964, no. 35 (ill.).
Mount, Charles Merrill. “The English Sketches of John S. Sargent.” Country Life Magazine CXXXV (April 16, 1964): pp. 931-934 (fig. 1).
Mount, Charles Merrill. John Singer Sargent: A Biography. New York, 1969, p. 465.
Ormond, Richard. John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors. London, 1970, pp. 34, 243 (pl. 48).
Hoopes, Donelson F. The American Impressionists. New York, 1972, pp. 58-59 (pl. 20).
Lomax, James and Richard Ormond. John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian Age. Leeds, 1979, p. 38 (ill.).
American Impressionism. Exh. cat., The Henry Art Gallery. Seattle, 1980, no. 39.
Ratcliff, Carter. John Singer Sargent. New York, 1982 (pl. 137).
John Singer Sargent. Exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art. New York, 1986, pp. 177 (fig. 75).
Adelson, Warren, Stanley Olson, and Richard Ormond. Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist Years. New York, 1986, p. 39 (pl. XII).
Masterpieces from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Exh. cat., Bunkamura Museum of Art. Tokyo, 1989, no, 72 (ill.).
McConkey, Kenneth. British Impressionism. London, 1989, pp. 72-73 (pl. 70).
Sargent. Exh. cat., Tate Gallery. London, 1998, pp. 29, 111-113, no. 31.
American Beauty: Painting and Sculpture from the Detroit Institute of Arts 1770-1920. Exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit, 2002, pp. 84, 86, no. 61.
Madsen, Annelise K. John Singer Sargent & Chicago's Gilded Age. Exh. cat., Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, 2017, pp. 152-154 (fig. 131).
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Credit Line for Reproduction
John Singer Sargent, Home Fields, ca. 1885, oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts, City of Detroit Purchase, 21.72.
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