About this work
The canvas drops the viewer directly onto a sun-baked Majorcan hillside, with no horizon, no sky, and no architectural framing to steady the eye — only a dense tangle of thistles, wild grasses, and low-growing herbage pressing against one another across the picture plane. Painted in oil on canvas and measuring approximately 56 × 70 cm, the work belongs emphatically to the Realist landscape tradition , yet its execution feels anything but restrained. Sargent floods the surface with warm ochres and dusty greens against the parched earth of the Mediterranean hillside, every brushstroke registering the coarse, prickly character of thistle stems and the sprawling informality of summer herbage. The composition resists any single focal point; instead, the eye moves restlessly across the web of marks, catching the light where a pale leaf catches it and losing itself again in shadow. In person, the work has been said to carry "the same sort of crackling, ecstatic energy that one finds in the best Abstract Expressionism."
Sargent first visited Majorca in the summer of 1908 and then returned with his travelling companions, Eliza Wedgwood and his sister Emily, for a more extended stay in September, lodging at Villa Son Mossenya, an old house in the picturesque village of Valldemossa on the mountainous western side of the island — a stay Eliza described as "ideally happy."
By this point, Sargent's notoriety as a portrait painter had earned him a ceaseless flow of commissions, but he had grown tired of their demands and restrictions, and was spending increasing parts of each year painting for himself in Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Spain.
In Majorca he was, as one observer put it, "in paradise," producing a remarkable series of lush plein air landscapes purely for his own enjoyment.
His pent-up energy for vivid color found expression in rich, expressive studies of the island's vegetation among its ancient terraced hills. The Thistles and Herbage is among the most radical of these — a painting with no narrative, no figure, no view: pure Mediterranean ground, rendered with absolute conviction.
This is a painting for rooms that can handle weight — a study, a linen-upholstered reading room, a hallway with good northern light. It rewards a viewer who is willing to stand close and spend time, watching the surface resolve from apparent chaos into something precise and alive. Sargent here makes "emotive colored marks over an abstract design that combine to express an abiding quality — wildness and life-energy sensed in nature." Those drawn to landscape painting that refuses prettiness — who prefer the unmanicured, the thorny, the honestly Mediterranean — will find it irresistible.
