The Sketchers

Two painters at work in an Italian olive grove: a woman in a pale blue coat and straw hat standing against a gnarled trunk, and a second figure in white seated behind a big cream parasol with the brush still in hand. John Singer Sargent painted his friends Wilfrid de Glehn and Mary Foote here in 1913, on grass broken up with fallen pink petals and shifting patches of sun.

Sargent's brushwork leaves the ground and foliage as thousands of loose strokes rather than shapes, so the green two-thirds is slow going. Finished size 51 x 68cm.