John Singer Sargent

Between 1922 and 1925, John Singer Sargent created a series of murals to decorate the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Each panel began with a simple compositional plan, from which Sargent worked with models to create a vast quantity of large preparatory drawings for each character and pose. This drawing, a very fast and rough sketch to capture the form of the figure, is for the goddess of wisdom Minerva within a depiction of The Judgment of Paris. As in other studies for this

project, Sargent worked with a male model, even though his subject was a goddess. After making a decision among the sketched poses, Sargent would repeat the figure with a clothed female model in order to capture the exact hang of the goddess’s robes over the appropriate torso.