John Singer Sargent
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John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the
most successful portrait painter of his era.] During his career, he
created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors,
as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre
documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the
Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.
Early life
William was an eye surgeon at the Wills Hospital in
Philadelphia. After his older sister died at the age of two, his
mother Mary (née Singer) suffered a mental collapse and the couple
decided to go abroad to recover. They remained nomadic ex-patriates
for the rest of their lives. Though based in Paris, Sargent’s
parents moved regularly with the seasons to the sea and the mountain
resorts in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. While she was
pregnant, on account of a cholera epidemic, they stopped in
Florence, Italy and there Sargent was born in 1856. A year later,
sister Mary was born. After her birth, though he longed to return to
his practice in Philadelphia, FitzWilliam resigned his post and
accepted his wife’s entreaties to remain abroad.They lived modestly
on a small inheritance and savings, living an isolated life with
their children, generally avoiding society and other Americans
except for art friends. Four more children were born abroad of whom
two lived past childhood.
Though his father was a patient
teacher of basic subjects, young Sargent was a rambunctious child,
more interested in outdoor activities than his studies. As his
father wrote home, “He is a quite a close observer of animated
nature.” Contrary to his father, his mother was quite convinced that
travelling around Europe, visiting museums and churches, would give
young Sargent a satisfactory education. Several attempts to give him
formal schooling failed, owning mostly to their iterant life. She
was a fine amateur artist and his father was a skilled medical
illustrator. Early on, she gave him sketchbooks and encouraged
drawing excursions. Young Sargent worked with care on his drawings,
and he enthusiastically copied images from the Illustrated London
News of ships and made detailed sketches of landscapes. Fitz William
had hoped that his son’s interest in ships and the sea might lead
him to a naval career.
At thirteen, his mother reported
that John “sketches quite nicely, & has a remarkably quick and
correct eye. If we could afford to give him really good lessons, he
would soon be quite a little artist.” At age thirteen, he received
some watercolor lessons from Carl Welsch, a German landscape
painter. Though his education was far from complete, Sargent grew up
to be a highly literate and cosmopolitan young man, accomplished in
art, music, and literature. He was fluent in French, Italian,
and German. At seventeen, Sargent was described as “willful,
curious, determined and strong” (after his mother) yet shy,
generous, and modest (after his father). He was well-acquainted with
many of the great masters from first hand observation, as he wrote
in 1874, “I have learned in Venice to admire Tintoretto immensely
and to consider him perhaps second only to Michael Angelo and
Titian.”
Training
An attempt to study at the Academy of Florence failed as the
school was re-organizing at the time, so after returning to Paris
from Florence, Sargent began his art studies with Carolus-Duran. The
young French portrait artist, who had a meteoric rise, was noted for
his bold technique and modern teaching methods, and his influence
would be pivotal to Sargent during the period from 1874-1878. In
1874, on the first attempt, Sargent passed the rigorous exam
required to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the premier
art school in France and there he took drawing classes, which
included anatomy and perspective, and gained a silver prize. He also
spent much time in self-study, drawing in museums and painting in a
studio he shared with James Carroll Beckwith, who became both a
valuable friend and his primary connection with the American artists
abroad. Sargent also took some lessons from Léon Bonnat.
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. This approach also permitted
spontaneous flourishes of color not bound to an under-drawing, and
it was markedly different from the traditional atelier of Jean Léon
Gérôme, where Americans Thomas Eakins and Julian Alden Weir had
studied.
Sargent was the star student in
short order. Weir met Sargent in 1874 and noted that Sargent was
“one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his
drawings are like the old masters, and his color is equally fine.”
Sargent’s excellent command of French and his superior talent made
him both popular and admired. Through his friendship with Paul César
Helleu, Sargent would meet giants of the art world including Degas,
Rodin, Monet, and Whistler.
Sargent’s early enthusiasm was for
landscapes, not portraiture, as evidenced by his voluminous sketches
full of mountains, seascapes, and buildings. However, Carolus-Duran's
expertise in portraiture finally influenced Sargent in that
direction. Commissions for history paintings were still considered
more prestigious but much harder to get. Portrait painting, on the
other hand, was the best way of promoting an art career, getting
exhibited in the Salon, and gaining commissions to earn a
livelihood. Sargent’s first major portrait was of his friend Fanny
Watts in 1877, which was also his first Salon admission. Its
particularly well-executed pose drew attention. His second salon
entry was the Oyster Gathers of Cançale, an impressionistic painting
of which he made two copies, one of which he sent back to America,
and both received warm reviews.
Early career
In 1879, at age 23, Sargent
painted a portrait of teacher 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. 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'.
After leaving Carolus-Duran’s
atelier, Sargent visited Spain. There he studied the paintings of
Velazquez with a passion, absorbing the master’s technique, and in
his travels gathered ideas for future works. He was entranced with
Spanish music and dance. The trip also re-awakened his own talent
for music (which was nearly equal to his artistic talent), and which
found visual expression in his early masterpiece El Jaleo (1882).
Music would continue to play a major part in his social life as
well, as he was a skillful accompanist of both amateur and
professional musicians. Sargent also became a strong advocate for
modern composers, especially Gabriel Fauré. Trips to Italy provided
sketches and ideas for several genre paintings of Venetian street
scenes which effectively captured gestures and postures he would
find useful in later portraiture.
Upon his return, Sargent received
several portrait commissions quickly. His career was launched. He
immediately demonstrated the concentration and stamina which enabled
him to paint with workman-like steadiness for the next twenty-five
years. He filled in the gaps between commissions with many
non-commissioned portraits of friends and colleagues. His fine
manners, perfect French, and great skill made him a standout among
the newer portraitists, and his fame quickly spread. He confidently
set high prices and even turned down unsatisfactory sitters.
Works
Portraits
In the early 1880s Sargent
regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly
full-length portrayals of women, such as Madame Edouard Pailleron in
1880 (done en plein-air) and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux in 1881. He
continued to receive positive critical notice.
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. As in many of
his early portraits, Sargent confidently tries different approaches
with each new challenge, here employing both unusual composition and
lighting to striking effect. His most widely exhibited and best
loved works of the 1880’s, however, was “the Lady with the Rose’’ (
1882), a portrait of Charlotte Burckhardt, a close friend and
possible romantic attachment.
His most controversial work
Portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), done in 1884, is now
considered one of his best works, and was the artist's personal
favorite. (He stated in 1915 “I suppose it is the best thing I have
done.”). However, at the time it was unveiled in Paris at the 1884
Salon, it aroused such a negative reaction that it likely prompted
Sargent’s move to London. Once again, Sargent’s self-confidence led
him to attempt another risky experiment in portraiture—but this time
it unexpectedly back-fired.] The painting was not commissioned by
her and he pursued her for the opportunity, quite unlike most of his
portrait work where clients sought him out. Sergeant wrote to a
mutual acquaintance:
“I have a great desire to paint her
portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting
for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. ..you might tell
her that I am a man of prodigious talent.”
It took well over a year to
complete the painting.The first version of the portrait of Madame
Gautreau, with her famously purging neckline, white-powdered skin,
and arrogantly cocked head, featured an off-the-shoulder strap which
made the overall effect even more daring and sensual. He soon
changed the strap to try to dampen the furor but the damaged had
been done. French commissions dried up and he even admitted to
friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he contemplated giving up painting
for music or business.
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." 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. Sargent
kept the painting prominently displayed in his London studio until
he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916, a few months
after her death.
Frederick Law Olmsted, 1895, oil on canvas, 91 x 61 1/4 in.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 his first
full-length male portrait, and the more traditional Mrs. Henry White
(1883). The ensuing portrait commissions encouraged Sargent to
finalize his move to London in 1886. 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.
English critics were not warm at
first, faulting Sargent for his “clever” “Frenchified” handling of
paint. One reviewer seeing his portrait of Mrs. Henry White
described his technique as “hard” and “almost metallic” with “no
taste in expression, air, or modeling.” With help from Mrs. White
herself, however, Sargent soon gained the admiration of English
patrons and critics.Henry James also took it upon himself to give
the artist “a push to the best of my ability”.
Sargent spent much time painting
outdoors in the English countryside when not in his studio. On a
visit to Monet at Giverny in 1885, Sargent appropriately painted one
of his most Impressionistic portraits, of Monet at work painting
outdoors with his new bride nearby. 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. In the 1880’s, he attended the Impressionist
exhibitions and he began to paint outdoors in the plein-air manner
after that visit to Monet. Sargent purchased four Monet’s for his
personal collection during that time as well. Sargent was similarly
inspired to do a portrait of his artist friend Paul Helleu, also
painting outdoors with his wife by his side. A photograph very
similar to the painting suggests that Sargent occasionally used
photography as an aid to composition. Through Helleu, Sargent met
and painted famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, a rather
somber portrait reminiscent of Thomas Eakins work. Though the
British critics classified Sargent in the Impressionist camp, the
French Impressionists thought otherwise, as Monet later stated, “He
is not an Impressionist in the sense that we use the word, he is too
much under the influence of Carolus-Duran.”
Sargent’s 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.
His first trip to New York and
Boston as a professional artist in 1887-88 produced over twenty
important commissions, including portraits of Isabella Stewart
Gardner, famed Boston art patron and Mrs. Adrian Iselin, wife of a
New York businessman, revealing her character in one of his most
insightful portraits. In Boston, he was honored with his first solo
exhibition which presented twenty-two of his paintings.
Back in London, Sargent was quickly
busy again. His working methods were by then well-established,
following many of the steps employed by other master portrait
painters before him. After securing a commission through
negotiations he carried out himself, Sargent would visit the
client’s home to see where the painting was to hang and would often
review a client’s wardrobe to pick suitable attire. Some portraits
were done in the client’s home, but more often in his studio which
was well-stocked with furniture and background materials he chose
for proper effect He usually required eight to ten sittings
from his clients, and he would try to capture the face in one
sitting. He usually kept up pleasant conversation and sometimes he
would take a break and play the piano for his sitter. Sargent seldom
used pencil or oil sketches, and instead went about laying down oil
paint directly. Finally, he would select an appropriate frame.
Sargent had no assistants and he
also handled all the mundane tasks, such as preparing his canvases,
varnishing the painting, arranging for photography, shipping, and
documentation. For all his efforts, he was commanding about $5,000
per portrait, or about $130,000 in current dollars. Some
American clients even traveled to London at their own expense to
have Sargent paint their portrait.
Around 1890, Sargent painted two daring non-commissioned portraits
as show pieces—one of actress Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth and one of
the popular Spanish dancer La Carmecita. 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. His portrait of Mrs. Hugh Hammersley was equally well-received
for its lively depiction of one of London’s most notable hostesses.
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'. 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.
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. He
also completed portraits of two U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson.
Sargent emphasized Almina Wertheimer's exotic beauty in 1908 by
dressing her en turquerieAsher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art
dealer living in London, commissioned from Sargent a series of a
dozen portraits of his family, the artist's largest commission from
a single patron. The paintings reveal a pleasant familiarity between
the artist and his subjects. Wertheimer bequeathed most of the
paintings to the National Gallery.
By 1900, Sargent was at the height
of his fame. Cartoonist Max Beerbohm completed one of his seventeen
caricatures of Sargent, making well-known to the public the artist’s
paunchy and puffed up physique. Though only in his forties, Sargent
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 palatial home, was a
resounding success, though Whistler did not approve of the looseness
of Sargent’s brushwork, which he summed up as “Smudge everywhere”.
One of Sargent’s last major portraits in his bravura style was that
of Lord Ribblesdale, in 1902, finely attired in an elegant hunting
uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high
productivity which included in addition to dozens of oil portraits,
hundreds of portrait drawings at about $400 each.
In 1907, at the age of fifty-one,
Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved he stated, “Painting
a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk
while working…What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to
look happy when one feels wretched.” In that same year, Sargent
painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the
celebrated self-portrait collection of the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence, Italy.
Sargent’s fame was still
considerable and museums eagerly bought his works. That year he
declined a knighthood and decided instead to keep his American
citizenship. From 1907 on, Sargent largely forsook portrait painting
and focused on landscapes in his later years; 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.
By the time Sargent finished his
portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics began to
consign him to the masters of the past, “a brilliant ambassador
between his patrons and posterity”. Modernists treated him more
harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of
American life and with emerging artistic trends including Cubism and
Futurism. Sargent quietly accepted the criticism but refused to
alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted, “Ingres,
Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I
like.” In 1925, soon before he died, Sargent painted his last oil
portrait, a canvas of Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston.
The painting was purchased in 1936 by The Currier Museum of Art,
where it is currently on display.
Watercolors
During Sargent's long
career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, roving from the
English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East,
Montana, Maine, and Florida, and each destination offered pictorial
stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the
pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless
intensity, often painting from morning until night.
His hundreds of watercolors of
Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a
gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one
reviewer noted, “Everything is given with the intensity of a dream.”
In the Middle East and North Africa, Sargent painted Bedouins,
goatherds, and fisherman. In the last decade of his life, he
produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American
West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.
With his watercolors, Sargent was
able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature,
architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it
is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most
purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful
fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and
fountains. In watercolors, he playfully 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). His first
major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in
London in 1905. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New
York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum.
Evan Charteris wrote in 1927:
”To live with Sargent’s water-colours
is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a
bright and legible world, ‘the refluent shade’ and ‘the Ambient
ardours of the noon.’”
Though not generally accorded the
critical respect given Winslow Homer, perhaps America’s greatest
watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in
the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique,
including the methods used by Homer.
Other work
As a concession to the insatiable demand of wealthy patrons for
portraits, Sargent dashed off hundreds of rapid charcoal portrait
sketches, which he called "Mugs". Forty-six of these, spanning the
years 1890-1916, were exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters in 1916.
Sargent’s largest scale works are
the mural decorations that grace the Boston Public Library depicting
the history of religion and the false gods of polytheism. They were
attached to the walls of the library by means of marouflage.
Upon his return to England 1918
after a visit to the U.S., Sargent was commissioned as a war artist
by the British Ministry of Information. In his large painting Gassed
and in many watercolors, he depicted scenes from the Great War.
Relationships and personal life
Sargent was a life-long
bachelor who surrounded himself with family and friends. Among the
artists with whom Sargent associated were Dennis Miller Bunker,
James 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’s supporters included Henry James, Isabella
Stewart Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works from Sargent,
and sought his advice on other acquisitions), and Edward VII.
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." 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 suppressed 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.
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."
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", and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the
heading "Sargentolatry".[84] By the time of his death he was
dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of
step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe.
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'. It has been suggested that
the exotic qualities[86] 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.[
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, 'Wonderful indeed, but
most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been
confused with that of an artist.' In the 1930’s, Lewis Mumford
led a chorus of the severest critics, “Sargent remained to the end
an illustrator…the most adroit appearance of workmanship, the most
dashing eye for effect, cannot conceal the essential emptiness of
Sargent’s mind, or the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of a
certain part of his execution.” Part of Sargent’s devaluation is
also attributed to his expatriate life which made him seem less
American at a time when “authentic” socially-conscious American art,
as exemplified by the Stieglitz circle and by the Ashcan School, was
on the ascent.
Despite a long period of critical
disfavor, Sargent's popularity has increased steadily since the
1950s. In the 1960’s, a revival of Victorian art and new scholarship
directed at Sargent strengthened his reputation. ] Sargent has been
the subject of 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.
In 1986, Andy Warhol commented that
Sargent “made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they
all have mood, every one of them has a different mood.” Also around
that time, critic Robert Hughes praised Sargent as “the unrivaled
recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours,
paid excessive court to both.”
John Singer Sargent is interred in
Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.
