John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Olive Trees, Corfu, 1909
Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch Collection, 2022.17
Oliver Wunsch
Assistant Professor, Art History
In his 1903 guide to Greece, the American archaeologist Rufus Byam Richardson advised readers that only “the painter’s art seems adequate to report Corfu.”1 A stroll through the olive groves on this island in the Ionian Sea left Richardson with the feeling of “intoxication without wine.” It would take an artist, Richardson thought, to record “this realm of beauty brought upon the retina.”
John Singer Sargent traveled to Corfu six years later, ready to do his part. He spent more than a month on the island, making numerous paintings of its famed olive groves.2 Corfu had attracted attention for its abundance of olive trees since the age of Homer, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the island had emerged as one of the world’s leading producers of olive oil (the harvest in 1909 was estimated to be 18,000 tons).3 But Sargent, like Richardson, concerns himself less with industry and trade than with subjective experience, painting tree trunks and branches with calligraphic swirls that convey the artist’s own intoxication with the landscape. The trees, more than the two figures who pass beneath them, constitute the painting’s main protagonists, their undulating limbs expressing as much personality as any human.
Sargent’s other paintings from Corfu occasionally touch upon the practicalities of the island’s economy. One notable example shows the migrant workers from Albania who performed much of the labor required to harvest the olives (see image). Even here, though, it is the arboreal figures that dominate the composition, their gnarled bodies and weathered surfaces indicating that they are the ultimate witnesses to this majestic landscape.
1. Rufus Byam Richardson, Vacation Days in Greece (London: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 3.
2. For Sargent’s time in Corfu, see Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 8 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 81–83.
3. George Raymond, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of Corfu for the Year 1909,” in Diplomatic and Consular Reports (London: Foreign Office and the Board of Trade, 1910), 3.
