Wild Olive Tree Roots, Valldemosa, Majorca

No sky, no horizon, no path leading anywhere. Sargent pointed his easel straight at a bank of dry earth and a tangle of olive roots, and that was the whole picture. The ancient trees of Majorca grow into twisted, knotted shapes over centuries, and the pale trunks here seem to melt into the rocks they cling to. Look for the chalky white stones scattered near the bottom edge, painted with a few thick dabs, and the reddish flecks among the leaves at upper left, dead foliage catching whatever light filters down through the canopy.

Sargent painted this around 1908, during a trip to the mountain village of Valldemossa, the same place where Chopin and George Sand had spent a famously miserable winter decades earlier. By then Sargent had grown tired of society portraits, the work that made him rich and famous, and he escaped most summers to paint whatever caught his eye with no client waiting. These landscape sketches were done quickly and outdoors, in the loose, impressionist manner he saved for himself. The result is less a view than a close study of texture: crumbling soil, silvery leaves, shadow pooling in the hollows between roots.