MURA · THE COLLECTION · JOHN SINGER SARGENT

Olive Trees, Corfu

Olive Trees, Corfu is a watercolour by John Singer Sargent from 1909, painted on the Greek island of Corfu. It combines transparent and opaque watercolour with scraping and wax resist over graphite on ivory paper and measures 35.6 by 50.8 cm. It belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

John Singer Sargent · 1909 · Watercolor and opaque watercolor with scraping and wax resist over graphite on ivory wove paper · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The catalogue entry describes light catching the twisting trunks of olive trees in a garden on Corfu. The museum's record of the medium shows how much Sargent did to the sheet: watercolour and opaque watercolour, passages scraped back, wax resist to hold the white of the paper, all over a graphite drawing.

How it was painted

Sargent was born in 1856 and died in 1925, an American expatriate best known as a portrait painter. Alongside roughly 900 oil paintings he made more than 2,000 watercolours, recording travels from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, Capri, Spain and the Middle East. Watercolour was where he escaped the pressures of the portrait studio, and he painted with restless intensity, often from morning until night. Scholarship has shown him fluent in the whole range of opaque and transparent technique. His first major solo exhibition of watercolours was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905; in 1909, the year of this sheet, he showed eighty-six watercolours in New York, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum.

Where it went

The watercolour belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn of Chicago by May 1930, when it was included in a display of watercolours lent by Mrs. Coburn to the Art Institute. It was given to the museum in 1933 and carries the credit line Olivia Shaler Swan Memorial Collection. In 2018 it was shown in John Singer Sargent and Chicago's Gilded Age at the Art Institute. The museum lists no current gallery for it.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to Mura's Impressionist Life collection with a luminous mood: Mediterranean light on old trees.