John Singer Sargent

This is a preparatory drawing for a painted panel intended to decorate the ceiling over the main staircase and adjacent conidors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After successfully decorating the dome at the top of the stairs, Sargent was invited in 1922 to continue work over the staircase. At his request, the barrel-vaulted ceiling, skylight, walls, and flanking pairs of columns were redesigned to provide suitable surfaces for his murals, a remarkable gesture by a museum then short of funds. This particular composition of the Judgement of Paris was never used. Sargent died just before leaving London to oversee the installation of his finished panels in 1925.