  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).
  
  
  Title
  Home Fields
  
  
  Artwork Date
  ca. 1885
  
  Artist
  John Singer Sargent
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1856-1925
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  American
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  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)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  American Art before 1950
  
  
  Credit
  City of Detroit Purchase
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  21.72
  
  
  Copyright
  Public Domain
