The house and its surrounding landscape are common images seen in Paul Sargent's paintings, which represent his passion for his family and Illinois nature.
Another influence was his older sister Pearl, who loaned him her oils to paint for amusement during recovery of an injury from jumping from a hayloft on the Sargent farm.
Research has found that Sargent painted a few murals around the city of Chicago, including genre scenes of the George Rogers Clark crossing into Illinois at the John M. Smyth school, a second at the Crippled Children's House of a scene from Robin Hood, and the third at Sherman Park Field House of Captain John Smith landing at Jamestown with colonists.
In 1930 Sargent returned to his alma mater, now named Eastern Illinois State Teacher's College, to teach private art classes to interested students.
Among his students was Ralph Wickiser, a teacher and administrator at Pratt Institute, and Alice Baber, a painter in the Color Field school of Abstract expressionism.
Aside from teaching at the Eastern Illinois State Teacher's College and working on his own career, he took pleasure in private tutoring for student artists.
Sargent taught his students many different lessons, from how to keep pigments from stiffening when outdoors in the cold to broad principles of picture making as fundamental to good representation and composition.