Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall

John Singer Sargent – Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909 | Giclée Print

50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — Reduced, 0.83× original
CHF 59.00
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Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • John Singer Sargent, Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909 — the watercolour sheet reproduced whole: old olive trunks leaning over a bright green meadow under a pale blue sky
  • Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at print size: an olive trunk with the whites scraped and waxed out of the wash, violet shadow against green grass
  • Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 50 × 40 cm fine art poster, unframed, shown flat against a light grey wall
  • John Singer Sargent, Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909 — the watercolour sheet reproduced whole: old olive trunks leaning over a bright green meadow under a pale blue sky
  • Sargent's Olive Trees, Corfu as a 70 × 50 cm giclée print, unframed, hung 25 cm above a 140 cm sideboard
  • Detail at print size: an olive trunk with the whites scraped and waxed out of the wash, violet shadow against green grass
John Singer Sargent – Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909 | Giclée Print

John Singer Sargent – Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909 | Giclée Print

CHF 59.00
Size

An olive grove on Corfu, painted outdoors in 1909. Sargent was fifty-three, had walked away from the society portraits that made his name, and spent his summers travelling with a paintbox. This is what he did instead.

Nothing white here is paint. Every light in the picture is the paper itself, kept clear or opened up again — the museum records the sheet as watercolour and opaque watercolour with scraping and wax resist over graphite. The bright scratches down the olive trunks were cut back into the dried wash with a blade; the flecks in the grass are wax laid down before the colour, so the paint could not take. Watercolour cannot be lightened once it is down. It has to be planned, or attacked.

The colour is a landscape painter's argument. The shadows under the olives are violet and blue rather than grey or brown, and the trunks pick up the same violet against green. Sargent knew exactly what the Impressionists had done with coloured shadow, and here he does it in a medium that gives no second chance.

What this is. A giclée reproduction printed with pigment inks from the Art Institute of Chicago's own open-access photograph of the sheet. It is not an original watercolour and is not sold as one.

Scale
Original: 50.8 × 35.6 cm / 20 × 14 in — watercolour on ivory wove paper, Art Institute of Chicago
50 × 40 cm / 19.7 × 15.7 in — reduced, 0.83× original. Image 42.00 × 29.44 cm.
70 × 50 cm / 27.6 × 19.7 in — original size, 1:1. Image 50.80 × 35.61 cm.

The large sheet is the watercolour's own size. Sargent's sheet is 50.8 cm across; on the 70 × 50 print it is 50.8 cm across. That is the size his hand worked at, and it is the reason the white border is generous rather than tight — the sheet was chosen around the picture, not the picture fitted to the sheet.

A note on the edges. The museum photographs the sheet on a grey studio ground, and a watercolour has a slightly ragged paper edge. We cut to the paper and print the sheet whole — no grey field, nothing added, nothing retouched. The measured crop runs 6335 × 4441 pixels, a ratio of 0.7010 against the catalogued 35.6 / 50.8 = 0.7008.

Provenance
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925), Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909.
Watercolour and opaque watercolour with scraping and wax resist over graphite on ivory wove paper; 35.6 × 50.8 cm.
Art Institute of Chicago, Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection, acc. no. 1933.505.
Mr and Mrs Lewis Larned Coburn, Chicago, by 1 May 1930; given to the Art Institute in 1933.
Public domain. The museum publishes its photograph under CC0.

The print
Giclée on 200 gsm FSC-certified fine art paper, twelve pigment inks. White border, optical centre. The colour of the museum's file is kept, not corrected. Unframed. Shipped rolled in a tube.

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