A blue church door between marble niches and worn steps

The lower storey of a great church front fills the sheet: two niches holding weathered stone saints, a fluted pilaster between them, and at the right a tall arched door painted in dense ultramarine and brushed with a paler diamond pattern. The marble is laid in with thin washes of cream, grey and violet that leave the paper showing through, and small brown strokes pick out the carving. Across the bottom the steps run in long horizontal bands of lilac and blue.

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.