This is part of a group of 611 photographs which once belonged to John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). The collection was presented to the Museum by the painter’s sisters Emily Sargent and Violet Sargent Ormond in August 1925, shortly after his death. Two months before, the sisters had donated a watercolour by the artist (Inv. no. P.2-1921), and they later gifted a tapestry-covered chair (Inv. no. W.39-1926).
The photographs reflect Sargent’s travelling lifestyle and breadth of artistic interests. The majority show architecture, sculpture and other art objects from a great variety of countries including Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, the United States and India. Sargent visited some of these countries in order to conduct research for The Triumph of Religion, his major mural project in the Boston Public Library (1890-1916). Although Sargent is known to have been an amateur photographer, it appears that most of the donated photographs were probably purchased from local professional photographers.
At the time of the donation, the collection was valued as an educational resource; the Museum wrote to thank the sisters for the photographs, which they affirmed would “prove very useful in the Library Photograph Collection, and the Sculpture Department,” and they were soon separated and classified geographically according to their content.
A significant subset of these photographs shows historical, often religious, Spanish architecture and sculpture. Sargent had a lifelong fascination with Spanish art and culture, and visited the country on at least nine occasions. The collection includes photographs of artworks which Sargent is known to have admired, and parts of Spain which he visited and painted often, such as Seville and Granada. At the same time, the fact that he owned photographs taken elsewhere in Spain (for example, Ávila, León, Murcia and Salamanca) suggest that he may have visited some of these towns, too.
A few of the Spanish photographs may have been acquired when Sargent visited Spain in 1879, a trip which was crucial to his development as an artist. For example, there are photographs from El Escorial and the Prado Museum, both of which he visited in 1879. However, many of them were almost certainly acquired later, probably as part of Sargent’s research for the Boston Public Library murals. It is known that Sargent travelled to Spain in 1895 in order to examine sculptures of Spanish Virgins with a view to gaining inspiration for one of the Boston Library murals.