John Singer Sargent
gigatos | February 21, 2022
Summary
John Singer Sargent (Florence, January 12, 1856-April 14, 1925) was an American painter, considered the “most successful portraitist of his generation. During his career, he produced nearly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His work documents his travels throughout the world, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine and Florida.
His parents were American, but he trained in Paris before moving to London. Sargent enjoyed international acclaim as a portraitist, though not without some controversy and some critical reservation. From the outset, his work was characterized by remarkable technical skill, particularly his facility with the brush drawing, which in later years generated both admiration and criticism for an alleged superficiality. His commissioned portraits were framed within a classicist style, while his informal studies and sketches showed a certain closeness to impressionism. In the last years of his life, Sargent was ambivalent about the formal restrictions of portraiture, devoting much of his effort to mural and plein air painting. He lived most of his life in Europe.
Prior to Sargent”s birth, FitzWilliam, his father, (b. 1820, Gloucester, Massachusetts) was an eye surgeon at Wills Eye Hospital (Philadelphia) during the period 1844-1854. After John”s older brother died at the age of two, his mother, Mary (née Singer), suffered a nervous breakdown, and the couple decided to leave to recuperate. They were nomadic expatriates for the rest of their lives, and with regular residence in Paris, Sargent”s parents moved regularly seasonally to lodgings on the coast and in the mountains of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. While Mary was pregnant, they stopped in Florence due to a cholera epidemic. John Singer Sargent was born there in 1856. A year later, his sister Mary was born. After her birth, much to his regret, FitzWilliam resigned his post in Philadelphia and accepted his wife”s pleas to remain abroad. They lived modestly, thanks to a small inheritance and their savings, leading a quiet life with their children. They generally avoided social events and other Americans, except for their friends in the art world. While abroad, four more children were born, only two of whom survived beyond infancy.
Although his father was a patient teacher of basic subjects, young Sargent was a restless child, more interested in outdoor activities than in his studies. His father wrote “he is quite an observer of nature.” His mother was quite convinced that traveling throughout Europe, visiting museums and churches, would give young Sargent a satisfactory education. Several attempts to formally school him ended in failure, mainly due to his itinerant life. Sargent”s mother was an amateur artist and his father a skilled medical draughtsman, and she soon provided him with sketchbooks and encouraged him to sketch the excursions he took. Young Sargent worked carefully on his drawings, eagerly copying images of ships from the illustrated weekly The Illustrated London News and making detailed landscape sketches. FitzWilliam was hopeful that his son”s interest in ships and the sea would lead to a career in shipping.
At the age of thirteen, his mother wrote of John: “He draws very well and has a remarkably quick and correct eye, and if we could afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be a little artist. If we could afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be a little artist.” At thirteen, he received watercolor lessons from Carl Welsch, a German landscape painter. Although his education was far from complete, Sargent grew into a cultured and cosmopolitan young man, expert in art, music, and literature. He spoke French, Italian, and German with ease. At seventeen, he was described as “stubborn, curious, resolute and strong” (by his mother), but shy, generous and modest (by his father). He had first-hand knowledge of many of the great masters, and wrote in 1874: “In Venice I have learned to admire Tintoretto immensely and to consider him perhaps second only to Michelangelo and Titian.”
Sargent”s attempt to study at the Florence Academy was unsuccessful, as it was being reorganized at the time; so, after returning to Paris from Florence, he began art studies with Carolus-Duran. The young French portrait painter, who had had a meteoric rise, was known for his energetic technique and modern teaching methods, and his influence was key on Sargent during the period 1874-1878.
In 1874, on his first attempt, Sargent passed the rigorous entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts, the leading art school in France. He took classes in drawing, including anatomy and perspective, winning a second prize, silver. In addition, he devoted much time to study on his own, drawing in museums and painting in a studio he shared with James Carroll Beckwith. Beckwith became both a great friend and his main connection to American artists. Sargent was also taught by Léon Bonnat.
Carolus-Duran”s workshop was progressive, dispensing with the traditional academic approach, which required a careful base drawing, in favor of the alla prima method, working directly on the canvas with the brush, as Diego Velázquez did. This approach relies on the correct placement of paint tones, while allowing for spontaneous flourishes of color not subject to any base drawing. This approach was markedly different from the traditional method of Jean Léon Gérôme”s studio, where the Americans Thomas Eakins and Julian Alden Weir had studied.
Sargent quickly became the star student. Weir, who met Sargent in 1874, said of him that he was “one of the most talented fellows I have ever met; his drawings are like those of the old masters, and his color is also superb.” Sargent”s command of French and his talent made him popular and admired. Through his friendship with Paul César Helleu, Sargent met art world personalities including Degas, Rodin, Monet and Whistler.
In these years, Sargent”s main interest was in landscapes, not portraiture, as evidenced by his voluminous sketchbooks filled with mountains, seascapes and buildings. Carolus-Duran”s experience in portraiture eventually influenced Sargent in that direction. Historical painting commissions were, at the time, considered more prestigious, but more difficult to obtain. Portraits, on the other hand, were the best way to build a career in the art world, get exhibited at the Paris Salon, and earn a living.
Sargent”s first major portrait was of his friend Fanny Watts in 1877, as well as his first appearance at the Salon, and his extremely well-drawn pose attracted attention. Her extremely well-drawn pose attracted attention. His second work at the Salon was The Oyster Pickers of Cançale, an impressionist painting, of which he made two copies, one of which was sent to the United States, both receiving favorable reviews.
In 1879, at the age of 23, Sargent painted a portrait of his master, Carolus-Duran with which he gained public approval, heralding the direction his mature works would take. His exhibition at the Paris Salon was both a tribute to his master and an advertisement for portrait commissions. Henry James wrote of Sargent”s early work that the artist offered “the slightly ”unique” spectacle of a talent who at the beginning of his career has nothing more to learn.”
After leaving Carolus-Duran”s studio, Sargent visited Spain. There he studied Velázquez”s work with passion, absorbing the master”s technique, while taking ideas for his future works. Enchanted by Spanish music and dance, this trip reawakened his own talent for music – which was almost equal to his talent for art – expressing it visually in his early masterpiece El jaleo (1882). Music would continue to play an important role in his social life, being a skilled accompanist to both amateur and professional musicians. Sargent became an ardent supporter of modern composers, especially Gabriel Fauré. His travels to Italy led to sketches and ideas for several paintings of Venetian street scenes, which captured gestures and postures that would be useful for later portraits.
After his return, Sargent soon received several orders for portraits; his career was launched. He immediately demonstrated the concentration and energy that enabled him to paint with the constancy of a laborer for the next twenty-five years. He filled the intervals between orders with multiple portraits of friends and colleagues. His manners, command of French and level made him stand out among the new portraitists, rapidly expanding his fame and prestige. His confidence led him to set high rates for his work and allowed him to turn down clients.
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Portraits
In the early 1880s, Sargent regularly exhibited various portraits at the Paris Salon, most of which were large-format works portraying women, such as Madame Edouard Pailleron (1880) (painted outdoors) and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux (the oil painting won a medal at the Salon the following year). With these canvases Sargent continued to receive positive reviews. Through the Subercaseauxs, Sargent met Amalia”s brother, José Tomás Errázuriz, also an artist, and his wife, the patron Eugenia Huici de Errázuriz, of whom he would paint several portraits.
Sargent”s best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of his models; his most ardent admirers believe that in this respect he is matched only by Velázquez, one of Sargent”s greatest influences. The work where the influence of the Sevillian painter is most clearly perceived is in The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), an interior work reminiscent of Las Meninas. As in many of his earlier portraits, Sargent dares to use different approaches to each challenge, employing in this case an unusual composition and lighting to striking effect. One of his most prominent and appreciated works of this decade was Lady with the Rose (1882), a portrait of Charlotte Burckhardt, who was a close friend and with whom he may have had an affair.
His most controversial work, Portrait of Madame X (Sargent himself commented in 1915 “I suppose it is the best thing I have ever done”), however, when it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1884 it generated such a negative reaction that Sargent moved to live in London. Sargent”s self-confidence led him to try a risky experiment, but it did not go well. This was not a commissioned portrait but, unlike what was customary, Sargent offered it to the sitter. Sargent wrote to a mutual acquaintance, “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think that she would allow it, and is waiting for someone to propose it as a tribute to her beauty…you must tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.”
It took him about a year to complete the painting. The first version of the portrait of Madame Gautreau, with its famous cleavage, white skin and arrogant, haughty head pose, included a dropped shoulder strap that increased the overall effect, making it more daring and sensual. Sargent changed the strap, trying to cool the reactions, but the damage had been done. Commissions in France suffered and he told his friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he was considering abandoning painting to pursue music or business.
Writing about the reaction of visitors, Judith Gautier wrote: “Is it a woman, a chimera, the figure of a unicorn raising its head on a coat of arms, or perhaps the work of an oriental decorative artist for whom the human form is forbidden and who, trying to recall a woman, has drawn a delightful arabesque? No, it is none of these things, but the precise image of a modern woman drawn by a painter who is a master of his art.”
Before the Madame X scandal in 1884, Sargent had painted exotic beauties such as Rosina Ferrara of Capri, and the Spanish expatriate model Carmela Bertagna, but these early paintings had not been intended for the general public. Sargent kept the painting on display in his London studio until he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, a few months after Madame Gautreau”s death.
Before arriving in England, Sargent had begun sending paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy. Among these were the portrait of Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), an extravagant essay in red and his first full-length male portrait, and the more traditional Mrs. Henry White (1883). The commissions that followed these led Sargent to move permanently to London in 1886. Before the Madame X scandal, he had been considering the idea of moving his residence to London since 1882, repeatedly urged to do so by his friend, the novelist Henry James. In retrospect, his move to London seems to have been inevitable.
Initially, British critics were not favorable to Sargent, criticizing his Frenchified manner of painting. One critic, referring to his portrait of Mrs. Henry White, described his technique as “harsh” and “almost metallic”, “without taste in expression, air or pose”. However, with the help of Mrs. White herself, Sargent soon won the admiration of English patrons and critics. Henry James also contributed to the dissemination and success of Sargent”s work in England.
Sargent spent much of his time painting outdoors in the English countryside when he was not in his studio. In 1885, during a visit to Monet at Giverny, Sargent painted one of his most impressionistic works, depicting Monet himself painting with his wife. Sargent has never been considered an impressionist painter, but at times he did use techniques typical of this movement, achieving great results; Claude Monet painting on the edge of a forest is done following his own version of impressionism. In the 1880s, he attended several exhibitions of impressionist painting and bought works by Monet for his private collection.
Similarly, Sargent also painted an outdoor portrait of his friend Paul César Helleu and his wife. A photograph very similar to this canvas exists, which seems to suggest that Sargent occasionally used photographs as an aid to his compositions. Through Helleu, Sargent met and painted the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, in a somber portrait reminiscent of works by Thomas Eakins. Although British critics classified Sargent within the Impressionist movement, Impressionist painters themselves felt differently. As Monet himself later said, “He is not an impressionist in the sense in which we use this word, being too much under the influence of Carolus-Duran.”
Sargent”s first major success at the Royal Academy came in 1887, with the enthusiastic response garnered by Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a large canvas painting outdoors, depicting two girls lighting paper lanterns in a garden in Broadway (Worcestershire). This painting was immediately acquired by the Tate Gallery.
His first trip to New York and Boston as a professional artist in 1887-88 resulted in more than twenty important commissions, including the portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Boston”s famous patron of the arts. His portrait of Mrs. Adrian Iselin, wife of a New York businessman, was one of his most penetrating paintings, revealing the character of the model. In Boston, Sargent enjoyed his first solo exhibition, in which he showed twenty-two works.
Back in London, Sargent was once again very busy. His method of working was perfectly established, following in the footsteps that many other masters of portrait art had previously employed. After securing an order following a period of negotiation which he personally conducted, Sargent would visit the client”s home to observe where the painting was to be hung. He might even go through the client”s closet to choose the appropriate costume. Some portraits were done in the model”s home, but often the studio was used, where furniture and materials were available to design a background to achieve the desired effect. He usually needed eight to ten posing sessions of the model, although he might try to capture the face in one session. He would try to have a chat with the client while he was painting him, and sometimes he would take a break to play the piano for the client. He rarely made a preliminary drawing, but painted directly in oil. Finally, he would select a suitable frame.
Sargent had no assistants; he did all the work himself: preparing the canvases, varnishing, preparing photographs, mailings and documentation. His fee was about $5,000 per portrait (approximately $130,000 today), and some American clients would even travel to London to have their portraits painted by Sargent.
Around 1890, Sargent painted two bold portraits intended for exhibition that were not commissions, one of the actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and another of the popular Spanish dancer La Carmencita. Sargent was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and became a full member three years later. In the 1890s he produced an average of 14 commissioned portraits a year, none of higher quality than the refined Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892). Similarly, his portrait of Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892) was magnificently received for its energetic portrayal of one of London”s most notable hostesses. As a painter of portraits in the classical manner, Sargent had unparalleled success; he portrayed models who were both ennobled and endowed with a special energy. Sargent became known as “the Van Dyck of our times. Still an expatriate, he returned numerous times to the United States in response to the high demand for portrait commissions.
Sargent painted a series of three portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. The second of these, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), is one of the best known, and he also painted portraits of two U.S. presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy London-based art dealer, commissioned a dozen portraits of his family from Sargent, the largest single client commission the artist ever obtained. These paintings show the high degree of familiarity between the artist and his sitters. Wertheimer bequeathed most of these works to the National Gallery. In 1888, Sargent painted a portrait of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Around 1900, Sargent was at the zenith of his popularity. Although he was only in his forties, he began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His An Interior in Venice (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their elegant palazzo, the Palazzo Barbaro, was a thunderous success. But Whistler did not approve of Sargent”s slackness of draughtsmanship, which he described as “blotches all over the place. One of Sargent”s last great portraits in his usual virtuoso style was of Lord Ribblesdale in 1902, in which he appears elegantly dressed in hunting uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high pace of work, in which in addition to dozens of oil portraits, he produced hundreds of drawn portraits, priced at about $400 each.
In 1907, at the age of fifty-one, Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved, he remarked that “painting a portrait can be quite entertaining if one is not forced to talk while working… How silly to have to entertain the model and look happy when one feels unhappy”. What nonsense to have to entertain the model and look happy, when one feels unhappy.” In the same year, Sargent painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the famous collection of self-portraits in the Uffizi Gallery (Florence).
Sargent”s fame was still considerable and museums continued to buy his works enthusiastically. That year he declined the award of the title of Sir and decided instead to retain his American citizenship. From 1907 Sargent largely abandoned portraiture and focused on landscapes. In the last decade of his life he made numerous trips to the United States, including a two-year stay from 1915 to 1917.
By the time Sargent completed his portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics were beginning to include him among the masters of the past, “a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity”. The avant-garde treated him more harshly, considering him out of touch with the reality of American life and emerging artistic trends, such as Cubism and Futurism. Sargent accepted these criticisms with resignation, but refused to alter his negative view of modern art. He replied that “Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, those are the ones I admire, the ones I like. In 1925, shortly before his death, he painted his last portrait, a canvas of Grace Curzon.
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Watercolors
During Sargent”s long and prolific career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, showing his passage from the English countryside to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine and Florida. Each destination provided enough richness and visual stimulus to be captured on paper. Even in his moments of rest, escaping the pressure of studio portraiture, he painted without pause, sometimes from early morning until late at night.
Particularly notable are his hundreds of watercolors of Venice, many of them drawn from the perspective of a gondola. His colors, at times, are extremely intense; as one critic wrote: “Everything is offered with the intensity of a dream.” In the Near East and North Africa, Sargent painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fishermen. In the last decade of his life he did a large number of watercolors in Maine, Florida and the American West, of wildlife, flora and native inhabitants.
With his watercolors, Sargent indulged in his earlier artistic inclinations: nature, architecture, exotic people and mountain landscapes. It is in some of his later works that one feels Sargent working most purely for himself. He executed his watercolors with a joyful fluidity. He also painted family, friends, gardens and fountains. In his watercolors he portrayed his friends and family in oriental costumes, in relaxed poses against brighter landscapes, allowing for a livelier palette and a more experimental technique than that used in his commissions (an example of this is A Game of Chess, 1906). His first major exhibition of watercolors was in 1905 at the Carfax Gallery in London. In 1909 he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York, of which the Brooklyn Museum bought eighty-three.
Evan Charteris, art expert and leader of London”s leading museums, wrote in 1927: “To live with Sargent”s watercolors is to live with captured sunlight, with the luster of a bright, legible world, the flow of shadows and the burning atmosphere of midday.” Although not reaching the levels of critical acclaim given to Winslow Homer, arguably the foremost American watercolorist, scholars note that Sargent completely mastered the technique of watercolor-transparencies and opacities-including the methods used by Homer.
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Other work
As a concession to the insatiable demand for portraits, Sargent drew hundreds of these in the form of quick charcoal sketches, which he called “Mugs”. Forty-six of these, made between 1890 and 1916, were exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (London) in 1916.
All of Sargent”s mural work is geographically located in the Boston area.
Upon his return to England in 1918 after a visit to the United States, Sargent was hired as a war artist by the Ministry of Information. In his large-format painting The Gassings and in multiple watercolors, he painted scenes from World War I.
In 1922 Sargent founded, with Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark and others, the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York, and Sargent was active in them and their academy, the Grand Central School of Art, until his death in 1925. The Galleries exhibited a major retrospective of Sargent”s work in 1924. Following this, he returned to England, where he died on April 14, 1925 of a heart condition. John Singer Sargent was buried in Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, Surrey.
Several exhibitions were held in his memory: in Boston in 1925, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Royal Academy and Tate Gallery in London in 1926. The Grand Central Art Galleries organized a posthumous exhibition in 1928 of previously unexhibited drawings and sketches from throughout his career.
Sargent was a bachelor who surrounded himself with family and friends. Among the artists with whom he associated were Dennis Miller Bunker, James Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey (who also worked on the Boston Public Library murals), Francis David Millet, and Claude Monet, whom Sargent portrayed. Between 1905 and 1914, Sargent”s regular companion on his travels was the artist couple Wilfrid de Glehn and Jane Emmet de Glehn. The three enjoyed summers in France, Spain and Italy and each appeared in the other”s paintings.
Throughout his life, Sargent maintained a lifelong friendship with fellow painter Paul César Helleu, whom he met in Paris in 1878, when Sargent was 22 and Helleu was 18. Sargent”s circle of friends also included Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works by Sargent, and asked his advice on other purchases, see Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum).
Sargent was extremely jealous of his private life, although the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his first models, said after his death that Sargent”s sex life “was notoriously scandalous in Paris and Venice. He was a sexual obsessive.” The truth about this has never been determined. Some scholars have suggested that Sargent was homosexual. He had personal relationships with Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. His male nudes reveal an artistic sensitivity to the male psyche and sensuality; this can be particularly noted in the portrait of Thomas E. McKeller, in Tommies Bathing, the nude drawings of Hell and Judgement, and his portraits of young men, such as Bartholomy Maganosco and Head of Olimpio Fusco. However, he also had many female friendships, while an equal sensuality is seen in his studies and portraits of women (especially Egyptian Girl, 1891). Art historian Deborah Davis suggests that Sargent”s interest in women he considered exotic-Rosina Ferrara, Amélie Gautreau, and Judith Gautier-was due to a whim that transcended aesthetic appreciation. The possibility of an affair with Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady in the Rose, is accepted by scholars of Sargent”s life.
At a time when art was centered on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent developed his own personal interpretation of realism, brilliantly reminiscent of Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His apparent facility for reinterpreting the masters in a contemporary manner provided him with an uninterrupted series of portrait commissions that he developed with outstanding virtuosity, earning him the sobriquet “the Van Dyck of our times.”
However, during his lifetime, his work generated critical comments from some of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote “he is not an enthusiast but a rather good interpreter” and Walter Sickert published a satirical text under the title “Sargentolatry”. By the time of his death, he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the American Gilded Age out of step with the prevailing trends in post-World War I Europe. Elizabeth Prettejohn suggests that the decline of Sargent”s reputation was due in part to the rise of anti-Semitism and the resulting intolerance of ”celebrations of Jewish prosperity. It has been suggested that the exotic characteristics present in his work attracted the sympathies of the Jewish patrons he portrayed from the 1890s.
Where this is most visible is in the portrait Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer (1908), in which the model appears wearing a Persian costume, a pearl-encrusted turban, and playing an Indian tanpura, accessories intended to communicate sensuality and mystery. If Sargent used this portrait to explore aspects of sensuality and identity, he seems to have had the satisfaction of the model”s father, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer.
Part of this loss of favor is attributed, also, to his expatriate life, which made him seem less American at a time when “authentic” American art, exemplified by the Stieglitz circle and the Ashcan School, were in vogue.
After a long period of lack of critical fervor, Sargent”s popularity has increased rapidly since the 1950s. In the 1960s, a revival of Victorian art and new studies of his work strengthened his reputation. Sargent has been the subject of major exhibitions at some of the world”s leading museums, including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, and a massive tour in 1999 with stops at the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), the National Gallery of Art (Washington), and the National Gallery in London.
In 1986, Andy Warhol commented to Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother that Sargent “had made everyone look more glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have character, each of them has a different character.” In a Time magazine article critic Robert Hughes praised Sargent as “the unrivaled chronicler of male power and female beauty in an age when, like ours, excessive tribute was paid to both.”
Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife sold in 2004 for $8.8 million to a Las Vegas casino. In December 2004 Group with Parasols (Siesta) (1905) was sold for $23.5 million, almost double Sotheby”s estimate of $12 million.
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