Stable+at+Cuenca

Date: 1903
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/2014/2014.1_1a.jpg&max=460 width="370" height="297" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=86617"]] || Title: **Stable at Cuenca**

Artist: **John Singer Sargent** Born: Florence, Italy 1856 Died: London, England 1925

Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 22 1/2 x 28 3/8 in. (57.2 x 72.1 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, and through the Catherine Walden Myer and Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowments

Accession: 2014.1 || //Stable at Cuenca// depicts a barn scene of donkeys eating feed and in the left foreground there is a male figure. The brushwork shows influences of the Spanish and Dutch seventeenth-century artists, Velázquez and Frans Hals respectively. Sargent used a colorful palette throughout with loose brushwork and used several techniques including wet-into-wet painting as well as contrasting passages of impasto and thin layers of paint.
 * About the Artwork: **

John Singer Sargent traveled to Spain in 1879. It's possible that he visited Cuenca, a city in east central Spain, during that time. The region Cuenca is located in was occupied by the Romans who built several settlements in the area, but during that period the site of the present-day city was uninhabited. When Arabs conquered the region in 714 they built a fortress called Kunka between two gorges carved by the Júcar and Huécar rivers. During the Middle Ages through the eighteenth-century the city was a flourishing center in the wool and handwoven carpet trade as well as a major agricultural city. In the nineteenth-century Napoleonic troops attacked Cuenca on three separate occasions which devastated the city causing a decline in population. Since the mid-nineteenth century the city has slowly recovered and has expanded from a population of 6,000 to almost 60,000 presently. A well-known site is the Cathedral, which is thought to have been begun in the thirteenth-century with funds from King Alfonso VIII and inspired by his wife Eleanor of England.
 * About Cuenca: **


 * Resources: **

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
 * Links: **