从1900年到1907年，约翰·辛格·萨金特(1856年-1925年)游历甚广，他去过阿尔卑斯山、意大利、西班牙、挪威和巴勒斯坦。1905年在巴勒斯坦，他画了一组重要的油画和水彩画，以及一组对贝都因人的研究。正是在这个艺术创作的爆发期，他画了《摩押山》(伦敦泰特画廊)，这是他展出的第一幅纯风景画(皇家学院，1906)。在意大利和西班牙，萨金特画了公园、花园、喷泉和雕像，这些题材揭示了他对文艺复兴和曼纳主义艺术的高级风格以及荒芜空间的浪漫之美的喜爱。

从这本新书中的作品可以看出，萨金特在旅行中重塑了自己的风景画家形象。他选择了奇特的视觉角度，并使用了一系列的构图策略——压缩、前缩、突然的剪裁和后退的视角——以一种类似摄影的方式，表现出一种经过精心练习的现代感。他利用颜料的物质特性，厚厚的颜料往往使人物和风景仿佛溶在一起，创造出丰富的、近乎抽象的表面图案。不安分的处理方式和动态的构图节奏与这位画家更传统的主题形成了创造性的张力，产生了不稳定和模糊的概念，具有明显的现代特征。

From 1900 to 1907, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) traveled considerably, visiting the Alps, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Palestine. In Palestine in 1905, he painted a significant group of oils and watercolors as well as a group of studies of the Bedouin. It was during this burst of artistic production that he painted The Mountains of Moab (Tate Gallery, London), which was the first pure landscape he ever exhibited (Royal Academy, 1906). In Italy and Spain, Sargent painted parks, gardens, fountains, and statues, subjects that reveal his taste for the high style of Renaissance and Mannerist art and for the romantic grandeur of deserted spaces.

As evidenced by the works in this new volume, Sargent reinvented himself as a landscape painter during his travels. Expressing a finely developed sense of modernity, he selected quirky angles of vision and used a range of compositional strategies—compression, foreshortening, abrupt croppings, and receding perspectives—in a manner that is quasi-

photographic. He exploited the material qualities of pigment, and the impasto is often so thickly applied that figure and landscape seem to dissolve together creating rich, near abstract surface patterns. The restless handling and dynamic compositional rhythms act in creative tension with the artist's more traditional subject matter, generating notions of instability and ambiguity that are distinctly modern in character.