Studies of Notus for "The Winds"

Sargent employs loose, gestural charcoal strokes combined with deliberate contouring to define volume. He utilizes a scumbling technique, layering light and dark charcoal to create soft shadows that model the bodies and hands. The interplay of sharp outlines and blurred edges gives the figures a sense of immediacy and three‑dimensionality despite the monochrome medium.

Created during the final years of Sargent’s career, the study was produced as part of the preparatory process for *The Winds*, a large oil painting that was never completed. The drawing remained in the artist’s studio papers and later entered a private collection before being acquired by a museum in the late twentieth century.

In the early 1920s Sargent turned increasingly to drawing as a means of rapid invention, often using charcoal for its expressive potential. This work reflects his interest in the human figure’s capacity to convey narrative through pose, a concern shared with contemporaneous modernist explorations of gesture and motion.

Although the accompanying oil painting was never finished, the charcoal studies have been cited for their insight into Sargent’s compositional planning. Scholars reference the drawings when discussing his late‑period approach to figure drawing and his adaptation of traditional drawing techniques to convey dynamic, almost cinematic movement.