Late in the summer of 1878, Sargent left Paris and his unfinished portrait of Carolus-Duran and traveled to Naples. After a week, he continued to the island of Capri, long a favorite destination for artists lured by its turquoise water and dramatic coastline. Sargent was in search of the exotic, and the same impulse that had carried him to Brittany the preceding summer and later led him to Spain, Venice, and North Africa drew him to Capri. The island was known for the exceptional beauty of its populace and for its relaxed way of life, the combined legacy of its early Phoenician and Greek settlers and of the days when Roman emperors had built over a dozen pleasure palaces there. Even twenty years after Sargent's visit, when the American painter Frank Millet described Capri, he remarked that "the primitive life of the peasant remains much the same in all essential features undisturbed by the gleam of the white umbrella or the red flash of the Baedeker" (Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 56, October 1898, p. 858).

During his stay, Sargent was befriended by an English painter, Frank Hyde, who had a studio at the abandoned monastery of Santa Teresa. Sargent used both Hyde's studio and his model, Rosina Ferrara, who was described as "an Ana-Capri girl, a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut-brown, with a mass of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type" (Charteris 1927, p. 48). For "A Capriote," one of several images he made of Rosina in profile , Sargent turned from the conventionally picturesque exotic types so popular at the Salon toward a more lyrical composition, perhaps inspired by the late sylvan reveries of Corot. He placed his model in an overgrown olive grove and intertwined her with a gnarled tree. Her twisted pose echoes the forms of the branches, expressing a kinship between them of wild and natural beauty.

Sargent not only was captivated by his model but also thought highly of this composition and made two replicas of it (both in Private Collections). The present picture, which bears the traces of underdrawing as well as of several changes in the model's pose and in the arrangement of her skirt, is the primary version and was exhibited at the Society of American Artists in New York in March 1879. A second version, "Dans les Oliviers, Capri," virtually identical save for its somewhat more freely brushed surface and warmer palette, was displayed at the Paris Salon two months later. Although they did not respond to the pagan spirit of the composition, some of the Parisian critics did mockingly propose a classical source, provoking a caricature entitled "Mademoiselle Laocoön in Capri" (Le Journal amusant, 28 June 1879, p. 7). In New York, "A Capriote" was described as a "Mediterranean idyll [its] delightful coolness, exquisite delicacy, and bright effect of light mark its author as an artist of such freshness and originality that we feel justified in basing great hopes upon his future work" (Daily Graphic, 8 March 1879, p. 58).

INSCRIPTIONS Lower right: John S. Sargent/Capri. 1878

ACCESSION NUMBER 46.10

ON VIEW Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Gallery (Gallery 232) 

PROVENANCE

1879, Daniel Cottier (1837-1891), New York; March 10-29, 1879, Sale of the Society of American Artists Second Exhibition to Ichabod T. Williams (1824-1899), New York; February 2, 1915, sold by the estate of Ichabod Williams to Knoedler Galleries, New York for $2950; sold by Knoedler Galleries to Elizabeth Milbank Anderson (1850-1921), New York; February 16, 1922, E.M. Anderson Collection Sale, The Plaza, New York, lot 6, to Scott and Fowles, New York for $2700; 1922, sold by Scott and Fowles to Helen Swift (Mrs. Francis) Neilson, New York; 1946, bequest of Helen Swift Neilson to the MFA. (Accession Date: January 10, 1946)