Home Fields

John Singer Sargent's Home Fields (1885) is an English rural subject from his early English period — wide open pastures or hayfields around the country houses he visited as a guest. The 'Home Fields' title suggests the fields immediately surrounding a country estate — the cultivated pasture of English park or farm land, quite different in character from the wild landscape of moorland or forest. Sargent brought his Impressionist eye to the specifically English pastoral landscape, finding in its light and atmosphere subjects equal to anything he had painted in Venice or Spain.

Sargent renders the home fields with his characteristic plein air directness: the broad sweep of English grass and pasture land under summer sky, the specific quality of English midday or afternoon light falling across open ground. His palette is fresh and green-dominated — the lush greens of English summer pasture — with the sky providing the tonal and chromatic complement above. Brushwork is confident and varied, capturing both the texture of the fields and the atmospheric quality of an English summer day.