Quarrymen hauling a marble block down a blaze of white rock

The whole lower half of the canvas is broken marble — great angular blocks in cream, ochre and blue-white piled down the slope. A quarryman in a straw hat and a red neckerchief crouches at the front, both hands on a heavy pale rope; a second man in a white shirt hauls behind him, and a line of smaller figures works beside a long ramp that runs up to the left. The quarry face rises grey and rust behind, with a wedge of violet sky at the top left.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the leading portrait painter of his generation, born in Florence to American parents and trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran. The scandal of Madame X drove him to London in 1884, where he painted the aristocracy and the great merchant families for two decades before abandoning commissioned portraiture in 1907 for watercolour, landscape and mural work. He travelled constantly — Venice, the Alps, Spain, the Middle East, Florida — painting in oil and watercolour with a bravura touch that was widely imitated and never matched. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Tate and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.