Richmond-Moll retraces Sargent's footsteps in the Alps

Thanks to research funding through his yearlong predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, doctoral candidate Jeff Richmond-Moll traveled to the alpine towns in Austria and Northern Italy that American artist John Singer Sargent visited and painted in 1914.

While in the Southern Tyrolean town of Colfosco, Jeff came across the grandson of a local resident whose house Sargent included in his painting A Tyrolese Crucifix (1914; Myron Kunin Collection, on loan to the Minneapolis Institute of Art). The descendant mentioned that he still had the seventeenth-century crucifix that once hung on the exterior of the house, and offered to take the sculpture out of storage and hang it back up on the house so that Jeff could examine the crucifix as it would have appeared in Sargent's time.

These and other on-site discoveries will allow Jeff to reexamine Sargent's unique encounters with and striking depictions of local religious material culture during his four months in the Alps.