Arab Gypsies in a Tent

1905-1906

Throughout his Bedouin subjects, Sargent relied primarily on the expressive power of the robed figures (women in blue tobs and men in white) animated by sharp, raking light. He consistently used the black tents as a broad compositional framework, both to exert control over the blazing desert light and to create the shallow pictorial spaces he preferred. Here Sargent also employed a more explicit and romanticized orientalist narrative that features a hooded Gypsy, whose tense hands, brilliantly sketched, hover over the round shape of a tray or bowl.