This long, high gallery is named for the great American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), who decorated its walls with his mural sequence, Triumph of Religion. The gallery is reached by a long straight flight of stairs, open to the hall above, leading between the wall of Bates Hall and the Chavannes Gallery. It is 84 feet long, 23 feet wide, and 26 feet high. The walls and stair balustrade are made of dark sandstone.
Best known today as a painter of portraits, Sargent embraced the opportunity the Boston Public Library project gave him to create murals which were thought, at the time, superior to portraiture in the artistic hierarchy. The paintings, created between 1890 and 1919, are Sargent’s first and most complex cycle of murals. They were unfinished by the artist after a controversy arose after a partial unveiling of the work.