The picture represents garden a garden arbour, defined by a trellis fence below, trellis edging to the roof above and two supporting poles. Bright sunlight filters through the light green foliage, to fall in splashes of impasto on the white tablecloth and the sandy floor. Some writers have assumed that the setting is a cafe but this is by no means certain.
It is the two wineglassess at the bottom of the picture which steal the limelight. Placed on a silver tray on a sideboard which cuts across the foreground in a sharp diagonal, they are suggestive of a tryst. The juxtaposition of still-life and sunlit scene is deliberately abrupt and shows the artist manipulating space and cropping his pictures from the very start of his career.
The picture is composed around a set of repeating right angles, those of the roof, distant garden wall, trelis fence and table. The foreground sideboard, representing the third side of the rectangle, emphasises the box-like construction of the picture space. The way in which light reflects off the leaves of the trees, the flickering brush work and pale greenish-grey tonality suggest a familiarity with the work of the Impressionists, Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro in particular, but there are more traditional influences at work as well. The two wineglasses might have been taken from a picture by Edouard Manet. Thus at this early date Sargent was pursuing a bold experimental vision, and responding to the latest influences in landscape art. Because of his technical facility, he was able to absorb ideas from a wide variety of sources rapidly and fluently.
The dating of the picture is uncertain. While the form of the signature is early, the inscribed date is different in character and was almost certainly added later. It is difficult to believe that the eighteen-year-old Sargent could have painted such an accomplished work within months of joining Carolus-Duran's studio in May 1874. An early photograph of the painting shows a second inscribed date '1875', below the one visible today. This later date is the more likley, and the scene may have been painted at St-Enogat in Brittany where Sargent spent the summer of 1875, or at the picturesque village of Grez-sur-Loing in the forest of Fontainebleau, which was a popular resort with Carolus-Duran's students.
The picture has always been widely admired, not least by the Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry, who was generally hostile to Sargent, and it is seen as a key early work. The archives of M. Knoedler & Co, New York indicate that the picture was in Carolus-Duran's collection and came to them via the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1923. It ws bought by Sarent's wealthy friend Sir Philip Saaaoon, who owned an important collection of the artist's work.
