Cliffs at Deir el Bahri, Egypt

John Singer Sargent

Oil on canvas

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This compact oil on canvas captures the dramatic limestone escarpment at Deir el Bahri, on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor — the sacred bay of cliffs that shelters the mortuary temples of Hatshepsut and Mentuhotep II. Sargent rendered the stark, sun-bleached rock formations with characteristically bold brushwork, his palette of warm ochres and tawny browns conveying the arid intensity of the Upper Egyptian landscape. The work was produced during Sargent's Egyptian sojourn of 1890–91, a journey undertaken partly to gather visual material for his Boston Public Library mural commission on the history of religion. It stands among the candid, observational landscape studies that document the artist's wide-ranging travels and reveal the same confident spontaneity found throughout his plein-air output.