Toledo c. 1903

Here we have, John Singer Sargent’s watercolour of Toledo, with these incredible washes of warm brown. It's like watching a landscape come into being through a process of layering and blending. Sargent's choice of watercolour lends itself to fluidity, you can almost feel the pigment mixing on the page. It’s so transparent, like looking through a veil. Notice the way he uses these broad, gestural strokes to define the landforms, and then these little touches of deeper colours for the trees and the details of the buildings. It's a dance between the intentional and the accidental, a real embrace of the medium. See those zig-zagging lines in the foreground? They're so raw, they remind me of the deliberate awkwardness you see in Guston, like the painting is unafraid to be clumsy. Sargent’s work, at its best, feels open-ended like a question posed rather than a statement made.