Sargent gave twenty-nine years of his life to the great mural scheme for the Boston Public Library, The Triumph of Religion, which he considered his masterwork. Commissioned in 1890 by the Trustees of the Library, the murals adorn the walls and ceiling of a vaulted, skylit chamber, the Library's Special Collections Hall, spanning 84 feet in length by 2 feet in width, on the third floor of the McKim building on Copley Square. Sargent, given free rein in his choice of subject, chose to paint key moments in the history of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. To find visual inspiration for the scheme, he went first to Egypt in 1891, shortly after receiving the commission, and used the experiences of the visit as material to develop his ideas for the murals, the first group of which were installed in 1903.'1

In an effort to revive inspiration for the remaining murals, Sargent made a second trip to the Middle East in 1905 and 1906, specifically to Palestine and Syria, immersing himself in the landscape and architecture of the Holy Land, at that time still part of the Ottoman Empire. The journey was one of his most concentrated campaigns of landscape painting, and resulted in more than sixty-five pictures and watercolors.2 They record a variety of landscape, architecture and peoples: the Dome of the Rock on the Sacred Mount of Jerusalem; the nomadic Bedouins; the Sea of Galilee; and the mountains of Moab.

Sargent's excursion to Roman Baalbek in what was then Syria and now sits within the borders of Lebanon, was the furthest northerly point on his journey, and an outlier after the predominantly Hebraic, Muslim, and early Christian worlds of Jerusalem and greater Palestine. The splendid watercolor exhibited here is one of three he made of the Temple of Bacchus (3) at the acropolis of the ancient city of Baalbek, called Heliopolis by the Greeks after Alexander the Great captured the Phoenician city in 332 BC. The construction of the temple, one of the best preserved Roman buildings still extant, was begun by the Roman Emperor Antonius Pius in circa 150 AD.4

The Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek has remained in the collections of the Sargent family until recent years. It shows the temple from the south looking towards the entrance portico; an Arab building stands at the background. Four columns of the peristyle on this façade are still intact, with a broken column and two column bases described in the foreground. Sargent has chosen a dramatically oblique angle of perspective to convey the great scale of the temple columns. Brilliant sunlight animates the wall of the cella, or inner chamber of the temple, casting dense shadows behind the columns; a deep-blue, clear sky, laid in between the wall of the cella and the columns, is a foil to all this light and shadow. This watercolor, abstractly pure in its limited elements and coloring, emphasizes the majesty of the ruined temple and is a masterpiece of Sargent's facility with the medium.

1 For a comprehensive and elegant account of this journey and its purpose, see Richard Ormond's essay in Ormond and Kilmurray, op. cit., pp. 145-48.

2 Ibid., p. 146.

3 The two other views of the subject are: Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 50.130.40, watercolor and graphite, 254 x 356 mm; ibid., p. 187, cat. no. 1319, illustrated, and p. 351; and Baalbek, private collection, watercolor and graphite, 279 x 432 mm; ibid., p. 188, cat. no. 1320, illustrated, and p. 352. The latter drawing was one of eighty-three watercolors purchased en bloc from Sargent by the Brooklyn Museum in April 1909, of which forty drawings from this group were de-accessioned in 1926 including Baalbek, which was then purchased by Mrs. Waldo Emerson Forbes, of Boston, by descent.

4 Ormond notes that the watercolor was exhibited in the 1926 Royal Academy's posthumous retrospective of Sargent's work under the title, In Greece; ibid., pp. 189 and 352, under cat. no. 1321.