I was looking over the sale at AllPosters.com, and found this picture, called “Gathering Flowers at Twilight,” by John Singer Sargent. I’ve never seen such a painting, and it isn’t in the Carter Ratcliff book. It isn’t very good—the foreshortening on the girl’s left arm is terrible, and her direct, haunting stare just does not feel at all like the confidence and nonchalance typical of Sargent’s paintings. (Although there is a kind of dark stare in his portrait of the Pailleron children.) The landscape does resemble his impressionistic style, and of course it has a signature at the bottom that might or might not be Sargent’s. The picture doesn’t appear at jssgallery.com, or johnsingersargent.org, the internet resources of Sargent’s work, and although this reproduction is sold at several poster websites, I haven’t found a website other than a poster-selling site that mentions this picture. It’s possible that it’s just a not very good picture—Sargent painted in haste sometimes. (He’s said to have painted this portrait during an hour of conversation.) But I wonder if it’s possibly inauthentic. If anyone knows anything about it, I’d be very interested in hearing more.
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