John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most
successful portrait painter of his era,[1][2] as well as a gifted landscape
painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American
parents.
John Singer Sargent January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most
successful portrait painter of his era,[1][2] as well as a gifted landscape
painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American
parents.
Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste
Carolus-Duran.
Training
Sargent studied with Carolus-Duran, whose influence would be pivotal, from
1874-1878. Carolus-Duran's atelier was progressive, dispensing with the
traditional academic approach which required careful drawing and underpainting,
in favor of the alla prima method of working directly on the canvas with a
loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez. It was an approach which relied on
the proper placement of tones of paint.[3]
In 1879, Sargent painted a portrait of Carolus-Duran; the virtuoso effort met
with public approval, and announced the direction his mature work would take.
Its showing at the Paris Salon was both a tribute to his teacher and an
advertisement for portrait commissions.[4]
Of Sargent's early work, Henry James wrote that the artist offered 'the slightly
"uncanny" spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has
nothing more to learn'.[5]
Works
Portraits
In the early 1880s Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and
these were mostly full-length portrayals of women: Madame Edouard Pailleron
in 1880, Madame Ramón Subercaseaux in 1881, and Lady with the Rose,
1882. He continued to receive positive critical notice.[6]
Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the
sitters; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez,
who was one of Sargent's great influences. The Spanish master's spell is
apparent in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, a haunting
interior which echoes Velázquez' Las Meninas.[7] Sargent's Portrait of Madame X,
done in 1884, is now considered one of his best works, and was the artist's
personal favorite; eventually Sargent sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
However, at the time it was unveiled in Paris at the 1884 Salon, it aroused such
a negative reaction that it prompted Sargent to move to London.[8] Prior to the
Mme. X. scandal of 1884, he had painted exotic beauties such as Rosina Ferrara
of Capri, and the Spanish expatriate model, Carmela Bertagna, but the earlier
pictures had not been intended for broad public reception.
Before his arrival in England, Sargent began sending paintings for exhibition
at the Royal Academy. These included the portraits of Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881, a
flamboyant essay in red, and the more traditional Mrs. Henry White, 1883. The
ensuing portrait commissions encouraged Sargent to finalize his move to London
in 1886.[9] His first major success at the Royal Academy came in 1887, with the
enthusiastic response to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a large piece, painted on
site, of two young girls lighting lanterns in an English garden. The painting
was immediately purchased by the Tate Gallery. In 1894 Sargent was elected an
associate of the Royal Academy, and was made a full member three years later. In
the 1890s he averaged fourteen portrait commissions per year, none more
beautiful than the genteel Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892. As a portrait painter in
the grand manner, Sargent's success was unmatched; his subjects were at once
ennobled and often possessed of nervous energy (Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, 1892).
With little fear of contradiction, Sargent was referred to as 'the Van Dyck of
our times'.[10]
Sargent painted a series of three portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. The
second, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), was one of his
best known.[11] He also completed portraits of two U.S. presidents: Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Other work
During the greater part of Sargent's career, he created roughly 900 oil
paintings and more than 2,000 watercolours, as well as countless sketches and
charcoal drawings. From 1907[12]
on Sargent forsook portrait painting and focused on landscapes in his later
years;
[13] he also sculpted later in life. His oeuvre documents worldwide
travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, Montana and Florida, and each
destination offered pictorial treasure. As a concession to the insatiable demand
of wealthy patrons for portraits, however, he continued to dash off rapid
charcoal portrait sketches for them, which he called "Mugs". Forty-six of these,
spanning the years 1890-1916, were exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters in 1916.[14]
Sargent is usually not thought of as an Impressionist painter, but he
sometimes used impressionistic techniques to great effect, and his Claude
Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood is rendered in his own version of the
impressionist style.
Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States
many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits. Many of his
most important works are in museums in the U.S.; in 1909 he exhibited eighty-six
watercolours in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn
Museum.[15] His mural decorations grace the Boston Public Library.[16] For this
commission, a series of oils on the theme of The Triumph of Religion that were
attached to the walls of the library by means of marouflage, Sargent made
numerous visits to the United States in the last decade of his life, including a
stay of two full years from 1915-1917.[17]
It is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely
for himself. His watercolors, often of landscapes documenting his travels (Santa
Maria della Salute, 1904, Brooklyn Museum of Art), were executed with a joyful
fluidness. In watercolours and oils he portrayed his friends and family dressed
in Orientalist costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a
more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions (The Chess
Game, 1906).[18]
Relationships
Among the artists with whom Sargent associated were Dennis Miller Bunker,
Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey (who also worked on the Boston Public
Library murals), Francis David Millet, Wilfrid de Glehn, Jane Emmet de Glehn and
Claude Monet, whom Sargent painted. Sargent developed a life-long friendship
with fellow painter Paul César Helleu, whom he met in Paris in 1878 when Sargent
was 22 and Helleu was 18. Sargent painted both Helleu and his wife Alice on
several occasions, most memorably in the impressionistic Paul Helleu Sketching
with his Wife, 1889. His supporters included Henry James, Isabella Stewart
Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works from Sargent, and sought his
advice on other acquisitions),[19] and Edward VII, whose recommendation for
knighthood the artist declined.[20]
Sargent was extremely private regarding his personal life, although the
painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after his
death that Sargent's sex life "was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively
scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger."[21]
The truth of this may never be established. Some scholars have suggested that
Sargent was homosexual. He had personal associations with Prince Edmond de
Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. His male nudes reveal complex and
well-considered artistic sensibilities about the male physique and male
sensuality; this can be particularly observed in his portrait of Thomas E.
McKeller, but also in Tommies Bathing, nude sketches for Hell
and Judgement, and his portraits of young men, like Bartholomy
Maganosco and Head of Olimpio Fusco. However, there were many
friendships with women, as well, and a similar sensualism informs his female
portrait and figure studies (notably Egyptian Girl, 1891). The likelihood
of an affair with Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose, is
accepted by Sargent scholars.[22]
Assessment
In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and
Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which brilliantly referenced
Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless facility for
paraphrasing the masters in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of
commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity (Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de
Metz ; Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, 1897, Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York) and earned Sargent the moniker, "the Van Dyck of our times."[23]
Still, during his life his work engendered critical responses from some of his
colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit
performer",[24] and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading
"Sargentolatry".[25] By the time of his death he was dismissed as an
anachronism,[26] a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic
sentiments of post-World War I Europe. Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the
influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the
1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking
aesthetic quality.[27]
Despite a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's popularity has increased
steadily since the 1960s, and Sargent has been the subject of recent large-scale
exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective exhibition at the
Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, and a 1999 "blockbuster" travelling show
that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art
Washington, and the National Gallery, London.
It has been suggested that the exotic qualities[28] inherent in his work
appealed to the sympathies of the Jewish clients whom he painted from the 1890s
on. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait Almina, Daughter of Asher
Wertheimer (1908), in which the subject is seen wearing a Persian costume, a
pearl encrusted turban, and strumming an Indian sarod, accoutrements all meant
to convey sensuality and mystery. If Sargent used this portrait to explore
issues of sexuality and identity, it seems to have met with the satisfaction of
the subject's father, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in
London, who commissioned from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his
family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron.[29] The paintings
reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his subjects. Wertheimer
bequeathed most of the paintings to the National Gallery.[30]
John Singer Sargent is interred in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.[31]
In December 2004, Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905) sold for $US
23.5 million, nearly double the Sotheby's estimate of $12 million. The previous
highest price for a Sargent painting was $US 11 million.[32]
^ "While his
art matched to the spirit of the age, Sargent came into his own in the
1890s as the leading portrait painter of his generation". Ormond, page.
34, 1998.
^ "At the time
of the Wertheimer commission Sargent was the most celebrated, sought-after
and expensive portrait painter in the world".
New Orleans Museum of Art
^ Writing of
the reaction of visitors, Judith Gautier observed: "Is it a woman? a
chimera, the figure of a unicorn rearing as on a heraldic coat of arms or
perhaps the work of some oriental decorative artist to whom the human form
is forbidden and who, wishing to be reminded of woman, has drawn the
delicious arabesque? No, it is none of these things, but rather the
precise image of a modern woman scrupulously drawn by a painter who is a
master of his art." Cited in Ormond, pages 27-8, 1998.
^
Notwithstanding the Madame X scandal, "There had been talk of his moving
to London as early as 1882, he had been urged to do so repeatedly by his
new friend, the novelist Henry James, and in retrospect his transfer to
London may be seen to have been inevitable." Ormond, page 28, 1998.
^ "In the
history of portraiture there is no other instance of a major figure
abandoning his profession and shutting up shop in such a peremptory way."
Ormond, Page 38, 1998.
^ This from
Auguste Rodin, upon seeing The Misses Hunter in 1902. Ormond
and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, page 150.
Yale University, 1998.
^ Rewald,
John: Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, page 183.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
^ Prettejohn,
page 73, 1998. Prettejohn suggests that the decline of Sargent's
reputation was due partly to the rise of anti-Semitism, and the resultant
intolerance of 'celebrations of Jewish prosperity'.
^ 'Wonderful
indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever
have been confused with that of an artist.' Prettejohn, page 73, 1998.
^ Sargent's
friend Vernon Lee referred to the artist's "outspoken love of the
exotic...the unavowed love of rare kinds of beauty, for incredible types
of elegance." Charteris, Evan: John Sargent, page 252. London and
New York, 1927.
Noël, Benoît et Jean Hournon: Portrait de Madame X in Parisiana
- la Capitale des arts au XIXème siècle, Les Presses Franciliennes, Paris,
2006. pp 100-105.
Ormond, Richard: "Sargent's Art" in John Singer Sargent, page 25-7.
Tate Gallery, 1998.
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