John Singer Sargent - The complete works John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era, 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. 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. John Singer Sargent | The Sketchers (1913) | Artsy biography articles A popular society portraitist and landscape painter, John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to wealthy American parents. He studied painting in France, where he enjoyed both critical acclaim and important patronage.

Although he spent most of his time in Europe, he frequently accepted commissions from collectors in the United States. Whether rendered in oil, watercolor, or charcoal, Sargent’s works are characterized by naturalism, lively mark-making, and a sense of immediacy. Influenced by his friendship with Claude Monet , Sargent loved working en plein air , depicting the various places he traveled, including Italy, rural England, Giverny, the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and the Alps. During his later years, Sargent completed several mural projects, as well as working as an artist-correspondent during World War I. American, 1856-1925, Florence, Italy, based in Paris & London Group Shows on Artsy How John Singer Sargent made a scene | Art and design | The Guardian Art and design How John Singer Sargent made a scene Often derided as staidly traditional, John Singer Sargent in fact provided a glimpse of the modern world. Ahead of a major new exhibition, Sarah Chuchwell surveys the sensational portraits that caught the imagination of painters and authors alike Rich and dark spaces … a detail from Le Verre de Porto by John Singer Sargent (1884).

Photograph: Image Courtesy of The Fine Arts Sarah Churchwell Friday 30 January 2015 09.30 EST Last modified on Tuesday 20 September 2016 06.13 EDT Share on Messenger Close In 1893, Henry James wrote an essay praising his friend, the painter John Singer Sargent, in which he declared: “There is no greater work of art than a great portrait,” because of the empathetic vision it required. Sargent was remarkable, said James, for the “extraordinarily immediate” translation of his perception into a picture, “as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling”. In particular, he admired Sargent’s “faculty of taking a fresh, direct, independent, unborrowed impression”. This admiration was widely shared: after seeing The Misses Hunter in 1902, Rodin called Sargent “the Van Dyck of our times”. But after Sargent’s death, his realism was viewed increasingly as anachronistic and facile, the work of a society painter, a careerist happy to pander to aristocratic privilege.

One of the most successful and esteemed painters of his day was rapidly dismissed as virtuosic but lightweight, a slick craftsman rather than an innovative creator, superseded by Matisse and Picasso. He was a Gilded Age flatterer, “not an enthusiast,” sniffed Pissarro, “but rather an adroit performer”. The forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery aims to end that assessment for good by crediting the texture and inventiveness of Sargent’s realism. It is not a full retrospective, focusing instead on Sargent’s interactions in artistic and intellectual circles, but it certainly makes the case for a show that would reveal all of Sargent’s range – not only the many magnificent portraits on display in this exhibition, but also his landscapes, watercolours, sketches and murals, as well as the extraordinary Gassed, the colossal late painting of soldiers blinded on the western front that anticipates “proletarian realism”.

Modernism – in the evolving forms of impressionism, fauvism, cubism –increasingly directed the energies of the art world during Sargent’s life, but while defiantly sticking to realism, Sargent redefined it by putting Van Dyck , Velázquez , Reynolds and Gainsborough into dialogue with moderns including Manet and Monet, using visual echoes and quotations to create a new fusion of classic and modern technique (portraits painted, following Monet, en plein air and sur le motif) with contemporary subjects and perspectives. James understood this, praising Sargent’s portraiture for “the quality in light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, enlarges and humanises the technical problem” of creating a realistic portrait. Pinterest Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sarhent, 1885-6. Photograph courtesy of Tate, London, 2015 This notion of art as perfect empathy is also the novelist’s art; it is no coincidence that James and Sargent have so often been paired.

They had much in common, not least as Americans raised across the European continent by affluent parents on a kind of permanent grand tour. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856, and spent his formative years travelling around France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. This “Baedeker education” made Sargent multilingual, “civilised to his fingertips”, in James’s words. But their affinities ran much deeper than being well-travelled cosmopolitans who focused largely on high-society subjects. Both brought to an apparently conventional realism an experimental sensibility, exploring psychology, narrative and identity. Sargent is the novelist’s painter, his portraits intimating entire worlds, dramas or what James always called “scenes”. Like James, Sargent had an instinctive appreciation for what it meant to “make a scene”. Sargent’s first biographer, his friend Evan Charteris, wrote in 1927 that Sargent’s best portraits reveal “Jamesian perplexities, the play of social type against personality, of the sitter’s inner nature against fashion’s constantly shifting ideals”. A celebrity in his day, Sargent was notoriously publicity-shy, avoiding interviews and ferociously guarding his privacy.

The artist William Rothenstein recalled: “I think of his huge frame, of his superb appetite, his constant consumption of cigars; of his odd shyness too, and his self-consciousness, of his decided opinions expressed with a Jamesian defensiveness.” Just over 6ft tall, he was affable, urbane and social, and devoted to the creation of beauty. Sargent told his cousin that his earliest memory was of a deep red cobblestone in a gutter in Florence that obsessed him. Drawing from a young age, he studied painting in Paris with Carolus-Duran, who became the subject of his first major portrait in 1879. His paintings elicited praise from the start and began to win prizes, his virtuosity of technique recognised almost immediately. At just 26, he painted both El Jaleo and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, as well as the beautiful Lady with the Rose. James called El Jaleo “astonishing” for “the sense it gives of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge”.

The famous Daughters of Edward Darley Boit offers a salute to Velázquez’s Las Meninas , but daringly composes its apparently conventional Edwardian subject around empty space, giving the painting a dark, enigmatic edge. RAM Stevenson, a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson who studied with Sargent in Paris, wrote of his classmate’s remarkable talent: “Sargent’s painting is strict painting, as Bach’s fugues are strict music.” An accomplished musician himself, Sargent was known for talking constantly while he painted, and would walk around the room (he once estimated that he walked four miles every day going back and forth around his model and the easel) and interrupt his work to play the piano. Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, painted in the late summer of 1885 and 1886, was named for a popular song; its style “is poised”, the exhibition catalogue notes, “between several aesthetics: French impressionism, English pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism”. Sargent’s chief aim in this portrait, all who watched him create it agreed, was to capture en plein air the transient quality of “fugitive evening light”.

It took him two years to achieve, for he could only paint for 25 minutes each night in late summer: every evening at 6:45 Sargent “would drop his tennis racquet”, remembered a friend, and “lug out the big canvas” from his 70ft-long studio into the garden, where he would paint for as long as “the effect lasted”. He had almost certainly been to Giverny by then, and had watched Monet paint out of doors. He came to share Monet’s preoccupation with the play of natural light, but he never fully embraced impressionism’s subordination of subject to technique, its willingness to dissolve representation into paint, colour and light. Although Sargent’s subjects were often posed, his oeuvre suggests the painter as flaneur, strolling through metropolitan cities and capturing the personalities he encountered, the scenes he saw.

His own coterie was stylish, knowing, chic: he portrayed other painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, dancers, including WB Yeats, Eleonora Duse, Edwin Booth, Edmund Gosse, George Meredith, Antonio Mancini (whom Sargent once described as “the best living painter”), the collector and hostess Isabella Stewart Gardner. There is the famous portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, raising the crown on to her head, and the 1885 picture of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, who said their portrait was “like an open box of jewels”. He painted a Chilean mining heiress, formidable and stylishly dressed, who became a lay nun and had her habit designed by Coco Chanel . There is An Interior of Venice, depicting the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, where James wrote The Wings of the Dove, and which some have speculated may have helped inspire The Aspern Papers. Sargent presented the painting as a gift to his hostess, but, offended by her appearance and her son’s informal pose, she rejected it, to the dismay of James, who wrote to her that he “absolutely and unreservedly adored” the painting.

She did not change her mind. There is Sargent’s first double portrait, from 1881, of the Pailleron children. They are in a claustrophobic, dark but richly furnished space, and seem to have a knowing gaze; viewers have since been reminded of the doubtful children in James’s Turn of the Screw, written more than 15 years after the picture was first shown. There is the scarlet Dr Pozzi, painted as a handsome, louche aesthete, whose dressing gown slyly evokes cardinals: contemporary British reviewers found it objectionably Parisian, too insolent, too en vogue. Sargent’s paintings may look staidly traditional now, but they were seen as modern when he painted them. Pinterest Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife by John Singer Sargent (1885). Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano Celebrity and theatricality were central to Sargent’s style, and his success. It is the portrait of Amélie Gautreau, titled Madame X, for which he remains best known.

Working on the painting, he told his friend the writer Vernon Lee that he was “struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness” of his sitter, but eventually, fusing techniques from Velázquez, Titian and Manet, as well as Sargent’s then fashionable interest in Japanese art, he produced a painting now seen as a masterpiece, but which first inspired outrage, creating a succes de scandale when it was exhibited at the 1884 Paris Salon. Reviews either objected to Madame Gautreau’s appearance (some complaining at the powder-blue pallor of her skin, others at the depth of her decolletage or the shockingly wanton shoulder strap allowed to fall suggestively loose) or hailed the modernity of Sargent’s technique. When he sold Madame X to the New York Metropolitan Museum years later, Sargent admitted to feeling it might have been the best work he had ever done, but at the time he was unnerved by the malice it elicited. He beat a retreat to London, where James had promised him a more sympathetic reception.

British critics did not, in fact, instantly embrace Sargent: The Misses Vickers was voted the worst painting of 1886 by the Royal Academy, for example, while the Spectator demanded: “Could we fancy anyone a hundred years hence caring to possess such a picture as this?” Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose might strike some viewers as prettily pre-Raphaelite (although they would have to ignore its spectacular luminescence), but it provoked controversy when it was purchased through the Chantrey Bequest, one journal reporting that “artists [had] almost come to blows over this picture”. Modern, too, are the expressionist portrait of Lee, who appears to be chattering away, and a lovely impressionist evocation of one of Sargent’s touchstones, Monet, characteristically painting outside, sur le motif. There is the famous 1913 portrait of James for his 70th birthday, which, as the catalogue notes, delighted the Master: “Sargent at his very best and poor old HJ not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.” Of Sargent’s private life, little is known.

He never married; although twice he was suspected of being on the verge of an engagement, nothing came of it. Many have come to believe that his extreme privacy was a sign on the closet door, signalling a life kept carefully secret to hide desires deemed unacceptable (and illegal). Certainly Sargent executed many – very beautiful – drawings of male nudes, which he did not exhibit during his life. It is also true that a number of men with similarly suppressed or hidden desires, including James, were among his close circle of friends. But so were married couples, and heterosexual philanderers. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who once sat for Sargent, claimed after his death that Sargent was “notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.” But no other affirmation of this claim has come to light, and Sargent’s private papers were destroyed. Many scholars believe he had an affair with Louise Burckhardt, who sat for Lady with the Rose, while some of his female nudes have struck viewers as being as erotic as his males. But in the end this is all conjecture. For better or worse – again like James – Sargent had married his art.

Lee wrote after his death that the only useful biographical summation would be two words: “he painted”. Late in life, Sargent declined the honour of a knighthood, because he was American. He died at 69, in his sleep, a volume of Voltaire beside him. It was 14 April 1925, four days after The Great Gatsby was published; the modern era was at hand, and it was Sargent, whether we know it or not, who helped show us what it would look like. • Sargent: Portrait of Artists and Friends opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2H, on 12 February. npg.org.uk John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) See works of art Works of Art (17) Essay The family of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) had deep roots in New England.

His grandfather, Winthrop Sargent IV, descended from one of the oldest colonial families, had failed in the merchant-shipping business in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had moved his family to Philadelphia. There, his son Fitzwilliam Sargent became a physician and in 1850 married Mary Newbold Singer, daughter of a successful local merchant. The couple left Philadelphia for Europe in late summer 1854, seeking a healthful climate and a distraction after the death a year earlier of their firstborn child. The Sargents’ stay in Europe was meant to be temporary, but they became expatriates, passing winters in Florence, Rome, or Nice and summers in the Alps or other cooler regions. Their son John was born in Florence in January 1856. John Sargent was given little regular schooling. As a result of his “Baedeker education,” he learned Italian, French, and German. He studied geography, arithmetic, reading, and other disciplines under his father’s tutelage. He also became an accomplished pianist. His mother, an amateur artist, encouraged him to draw, and her wanderlust furnished him with subjects.

He enrolled for his first-documented formal art training during the winter of 1873–74 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In spring 1874, Fitzwilliam Sargent resolved to nourish his son’s talent in Paris , which had become the world’s most powerful magnet for art students. In May 1874, Sargent entered the teaching atelier of a youthful, stylish painter, Carolus-Duran, a leading portraitist in Third Republic France who encouraged his students to paint immediately (rather than make preliminary drawings), to exploit broad planes of viscous pigment, and to preserve the freshness of the sketch in completed works. He also exhorted them to study artists who demonstrated painterly freedom: Frans Hals and Rembrandt ; Sir Anthony van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds; and, above all others, the Spanish master Diego Velázquez . The young American moved close to his teacher stylistically and became his protégé. There is almost no work by Sargent, beginning with his successful submissions to the Paris Salons as early as 1877, that does not reflect the manner of Carolus-Duran or the old masters of the painterly tradition.

In May 1876, accompanied by his mother and his sister Emily, Sargent began his first trip to the United States, which would include visits to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and Niagara Falls. By autumn 1879, no longer attending classes regularly and concentrating on building his career, Sargent began a period of extensive travel to view works by the old masters and to gather ideas for pictures, visiting Spain, Holland, and Venice. Picturesque locales prompted Sargent to paint genre scenes, which he showed alongside his portraits as he built his reputation. Some of his sun-drenched canvases of the late 1870s bespeak the influence of Claude Monet , whom Sargent seems to have met in Paris as early as 1876 at the second Impressionist exhibition. Although Sargent painted, showed, and won praise for both portraits and subject pictures at the Salons between 1877 and 1882, commissions for portraits increasingly demanded his attention and defined his reputation.

Sargent’s best-known portrait, Madame X ( 16.53 ), which he undertook without a commission, enlisted a palette and brushwork derived from Velázquez; a profile view that recalls Titian ; and an unmodulated treatment of the face and figure inspired by the style of Édouard Manet and Japanese prints . The picture’s novelty and quality notwithstanding, it was a succès de scandale in the 1884 Salon, provoking criticism for Sargent’s indifference to conventions of pose, modeling, and treatment of space, even twenty years after Manet’s pioneering efforts. Having gained notoriety rather than fame, Sargent decided that London, where he had thought of settling as early as 1882, would be more hospitable than Paris. In spring 1886, he moved to England for the rest of his life. Fearful that Sargent might sacrifice characterization to a show of “French style,” which they associated with Madame X and, perforce, disliked, English patrons at first withheld commissions. With time and creative energy to spare, Sargent spent several summers engaged in Impressionist projects.

These were nourished by his contact with Monet, whom he visited several times at Giverny, beginning in early summer 1885, and by the chance to work outdoors during the summers of 1885 and 1886 in the Cotswolds village of Broadway, Worcestershire. Sargent’s most ambitious Broadway canvas was the ravishing Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (Tate Britain, London). The painting’s display at the Royal Academy in 1887 assuaged the doubts of English critics, and its acquisition for the British nation augured well for his career in London. Although English patrons still hesitated to sit for Sargent during the late 1880s, Americans were eager to do so during his visits to the United States between 1887 and 1889. Reassured by the conspicuous quality of Sargent’s portraits, British patrons finally responded with numerous commissions during the 1890s. While his subjects included businessmen and their families, artists, and performers, Sargent flourished particularly as a purveyor of likenesses to the English aristocracy.

He maintained a dialogue with tradition, creating grand-manner pendants to family heirlooms by van Dyck, Reynolds, and others. American patrons also continued to call upon Sargent’s skills. After the turn of the century, Sargent grew tired of the demands of portrait painting. He was constantly preoccupied with mural paintings for the Boston Public Library, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University, for which he had received a series of commissions beginning in 1890. Travel studies in watercolor also came to occupy more of his time and became a new source of critical and financial support. Beginning in 1903, he showed such pictures to acclaim in London and New York, stimulating a great demand for them. Sargent engineered his career so astutely that by 1907, when he pledged not to accept any more portrait commissions, he had established a solid reputation as a watercolorist. H. Barbara Weinberg The American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 Citation Weinberg, H. Barbara. “John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.

New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Further Reading Kilmurray, Elaine, and Richard Ormond, eds. John Singer Sargent. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery, 1998. Additional Essays by H. Barbara Weinberg Weinberg, H. Barbara. “ American Impressionism .” (October 2004) John Singer Sargent Watercolors | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 13, 2013 – January 20, 2014 Ann and Graham Gund Gallery (Gallery LG31) A triumphant show combines the two best collections of John Singer Sargent’s dazzling watercolors Prepare for bedazzlement—The New York Times “To live with Sargent’s water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held,” according to the painter’s first biographer.

Presenting more than 90 of Sargent’s dazzling works, this exhibition, co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum, combines for the first time the two most significant collections of watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), images created by a consummate artist with daring compositional strategies and a complex technique. “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” also celebrates a century of Sargent watercolors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to view the magnificent works Sargent produced between 1902 and 1911, when he was at the height of his artistic powers and internationally recognized as the greatest American painter of his age. His bold and experimental approach to the medium caused a sensation in Britain and great excitement in America. The Brooklyn and Boston holdings (never before explored in a focused exhibition) were purchased by the two museums straight from Sargent’s only two American watercolor exhibitions, held at Knoedler Gallery in New York.

(Brooklyn acquired its collection in 1909, and the MFA in 1912.) These daringly conceived compositions (along with a select group of oils), made in Spain and Portugal, Greece, Switzerland and the Alps, regions of Italy, Syria and Palestine, demonstrate the unity of Sargent’s artistic vision after the turn of the 20th century, when he sought to liberate himself from the burden of portrait commissions and to devote himself instead to painting scenes of landscape, labor, and leisure. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue exploring Sargent’s engagement with watercolor painting and examining the technical mastery that led to such brilliant work. Above: John Singer Sargent, Simplon Pass: Reading, 1911. Watercolor and wax resist over graphite on paper. The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund. John Singer Sargent Paintings, Prints & Artwork | JohnSingerSargent.net Buy Now from Art.com John Singer Sargent was a breathtaking American portrait painter whose career spanned the late 19th to early 20th centuries Having been born in Florence, Sargent also had strong ties to European art and the influences of that are clear to see in his work.

This was a highly competitive time for western art but Singer Sargent had the skills required to really draw attention to his work and this would then lead onwards to some truly prestigious commissions, with many famous celebrities falling over themselves to attract his services. The best known portrait painting by the artist could be Theodore Roosevelt when considering the status of this subject, but there are also many other significant portrait paintings which technically are just as impressive. Check out more on Singer Sargent here. The versatility and productivity of Singer Sargent was incredible, always looking to produce more and more and a selection of different mediums which he would happily experiment in order to push his own career achievements onwards. Watercolours and oils were the artist's main focus and he created hundreds of works in both formats during an extended career which takes some time to really look into in the detail that it undoubtedly deserves. Sargent also produced many charcoal drawings too, and these help us to appreciate his raw technical skills that lay behind his work in all different mediums. Sketches play in a significant part in the work of many portrait painters, such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as they looked to hone their skills.

Sargent was born into an international family, American parents living in Europe, and this may have been the secret behind his passion for travel. His art documents his constant travels, with work capturing stunning scenes in the likes of Venice, Corfu and the Middle East plus Montana, Maine and Florida in the United States. Sargent received his artistic training in mid to late 20th century Paris. The French capital was the centre for international art at that time, and was to gift us several key art movements including Impressionism and Cubism, to name just two. John attended the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and this his first step along the path to developing his natural talents. The artists's travels progressed his development as an artist beyond all recognition, such as his spell in Spain where he was to study in detail the wor of Diego Velazquez. This was a different approach to painting which he found exciting and more original than the academically approved methods which he had been taught previously. French art had an even greater impact on this open-minded artist, thanks to meetings with significant artists like Degas, Rodin, Monet and Whistler.

It was an important time in European art at that time, and Singer Sargent was right in the middle of it. The earlier work from the American was predominantly landscape based, before his passion was to switch to portraits later on in his life. It then returned to landscape art after that, when Plein Air was to become his preferred artistic environment. Sargent's travels were aided by his impressive language skills, being fluent in English, French, Italian and German. This was to help him to understand more about the art that he came across during his travels, as well as the stories behind it. For example, in Italy he was to be impressed with several works of Tintoretto, comparing them to the achievements of Michelangelo and Titian. New Appreciation for the Watercolor Works of Sargent - The New York Times The New York Times Arts |Examining Sargent’s Shift From Oil to Watercolors Search Continue reading the main story BY the time John Singer Sargent reached his mid-40s at the beginning of the 20th century, he had long been saluted as the best society portrait painter of the Gilded Age. But he was having a midlife career crisis.

He was a darling of established critics, but to up-and-coming artists, he seemed old-fashioned. Around 1900, he put down his oils and turned to watercolors, capturing landscapes, gardens, exotic locales, and people at leisure, at work and at rest, often on his travels in Europe and the Middle East. Experimenting with unusual compositions and new techniques, he reinvented himself aesthetically. Sargent never did convince modernist artists that he was one of them. But the curators at the two museums that bought many of those works a century ago are hoping for a different outcome when “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” goes on view, first at the Brooklyn Museum on April 5, then at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Oct. 13. The exhibition brings together 93 of Sargent’s best watercolors from 1902-12 for the first time. “These were years when he was very experimental,” said Teresa A. Carbone, the curator of American art at the Brooklyn. Sargent was living in London, where watercolors were highly prized.

His, though, were different from those of British watercolorists — more gestural, for one thing, and mystifying for their use of opaque watercolors at a time when they were typically translucent. Continue reading the main story The lush results are not only “very beautiful,” Ms. Carbone said, but also innovative in ways that are just now being appreciated — even by her and Erica E. Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings at the Boston museum, who collaborated on the exhibition. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Ms. Carbone planted the seed for the show in 2008, with an e-mail to Ms. Hirshler. “We were besieged by requests for loans of the Sargent watercolors, and I thought we ought to think about what we wanted to do with them ourselves,” Ms. Carbone said. Her first thought was, why not unite the two collections? Ms. Hirshler agreed. “Then it became more interesting,” Ms. Hirshler said, as the two curators began their research.

Among the things they discovered was that these works represented Sargent’s own “vision of himself as a watercolorist at a very important moment.” As such, they were far from tangential to his career. Photo "Carrara: Lizzatori I," a watercolor by John Singer Sargent in 1911. Credit Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Sargent, “an obsessive traveler” in the words of Ms. Carbone, would sit with his brushes and watercolors on his journeys, capturing the scenes before him, often from odd angles — low in a Venetian gondola, for example. He made dozens and dozens of images, many in a series, intending to keep them himself. When he allowed some to be exhibited in London in 1903, 1905 and 1908, they elicited mostly good reviews. But they were never for sale. Then, in 1908, his friend, the Boston artist Edward Darley Boit — whose family was the subject of Sargent’s renowned 1882 painting “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” — wrote to him.

Boit proposed a joint exhibition at the Knoedler & Company gallery in New York. Sargent eventually agreed, probably to help his old friend’s career. As Ms. Hirshler recounts in her essay for the exhibition catalog, he wrote to Boit that “sketches from nature give me pleasure to do + pleasure to keep + more than the small amount of money that one could ask for them.” He did not want to be bothered by repeated requests to see them. Relenting slightly, Sargent raised a possibility: “... I really do not care to sell them — at any rate not piecemeal. If by any chance some Eastern Museum, or some Eastern collector wanted to buy the whole lot en bloc, I might consider it.” His watercolors, he declared, “only amount to anything when taken as a lot together.” Sargent selected 86 watercolors and packed them off to New York, where they drew glowing reviews and crowds of viewers. Knoedler, aware of the artist’s wishes, contacted museums in hopes of making a sale. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.

Sign Up Privacy Policy The Brooklyn Museum quickly made an offer for 83 of the watercolors (three were truly not for sale). Sargent hesitated, wondering if Boston, where he had more patrons and closer ties, was interested. Boit and his brother called the Museum of Fine Arts there, but its bid came too late and was smaller. Brooklyn won the trove for $20,000 (about $500,000 in today’s dollars). Soon Boit proposed another joint exhibition, and Sargent agreed. The date was set for 1912. This time, the Boston museum raised its hand early in the preparation for the exhibition, and before the opening it bought 45 watercolors for about $10,800. Advertisement As visitors to “John Singer Sargent Watercolors” will see, the two collections are very different. Photo "In a Medici Villa," by John Singer Sargent in 1906. Credit Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn’s works are mostly smaller, freer, more expressive. Almost none are signed. Knowing that his next works would land in Boston, Sargent made them larger and more finished, and signed them.

“They are all just a delight,” Ms. Carbone said. “We don’t tire of looking at them, and people will experience that when they come. Some of the subjects have pictorial depth, but not a lot. It’s all about Sargent’s immersion in the process.” They are all spontaneous, she added, but it’s also clear that Sargent “worked the sheets very aggressively. There are nuances, shifts in technique.” Many, like “In a Medici Villa,” from 1906, show Sargent as a master of reflected light. Some, like a series portraying the marble quarries above Carrara, border on the abstract. What he didn’t paint is often as interesting as what he did. One of Sargent’s favorites, “Bedouins,” from 1905-6, was shown and critically acclaimed twice in London before he sent it to New York. It shows two tribesmen, with faces sharply rendered; their garments are suggested as if the watercolors dissolved. Some are reminiscent of his oils. “The Cashmere Shawl,” from about 1911, is one.

It depicts a woman in a white dress and patterned shawl, an example of his use of the wax resist technique, which left some spaces perfectly white. “It’s a phenomenal work,” Ms. Carbone said. “It’s close to his regular portrait practice, but the whole sheet is executed all the way to the edges. It’s freer.” In Brooklyn, the museum engaged a watercolorist to demonstrate six of Sargent’s watercolor techniques, including wax resist and scraping, in videos that will be shown on small monitors in the galleries. As they view these works, visitors will see, as many contemporaries did, that far from stagnating, Sargent was innovating in his watercolors. Yet it’s easy to understand why appreciation of them faded. By 1910, abstract art was budding in Europe and America. A year after Sargent’s second exhibition at Knoedler, the momentous 1913 Armory Show in New York took place, changing everything in the art world. “His modernism becomes old-fashioned very quickly,” said Ms. Hirshler. Sargent’s reputation declined, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that his oils came back into favor.

Now, perhaps, is the time for his watercolors to regain their renown. A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2013, on Page F8 of the New York edition with the headline: Examining Sargent’s Shift From Oil to Watercolors. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy | The Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories Exhibition History Art Institute of Chicago, Twenty-fifth Annual Exhibition of American Oil Paintings and Sculpture, November 5-December 8, 1912, cat. 228. New York, Grand Central Art Galleries, Retrospective Exhibition of Important Works of John Singer Sargent, February 23-March 22, 1924, cat. 48. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Memorial Exhibition of the Work of John Singer Sargent, January 4-February 14, 1926, cat. 50.

State Fair of Texas, Art Department, 1933 Exhibition Showing the Changes in Painting for the Last Hundred Years in Europe and America, 1933, cat. 76. Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress, June 1-November 1, 1934, cat. 407. Indiana, South Bend Art Association, American Painting in the Manner of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, February 10-March 31, 1948, cat. 46. Art Institute of Chicago, Sargent, Whistler and Mary Cassatt, January 14-February 25, 1954; traveled to New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 25-May 23, 1954. Grand Rapids Art Museum, Cassatt, Whistler, Sargent Exhibition, September 15-October 15, 1955, cat. 27. Durand Art Institute, Lake Forest College, A Century of American Painting: Masterpieces Loaned by The Art Institute of Chicago, June 10-16, 1957, cat.

16, as The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati. Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Private World of John Singer Sargent, April 18-June 14, 1964; traveled to Cleveland Museum of Art, July 7-August 16, 1964; Worcester Art Museum, September 17-November 1, 1964; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, November 15, 1964-January 3, 1965, cat. 73. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, John Singer Sargent, October 1, 1986-January 4, 1987, cat. 149. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, The Lure of Italy, September 16-December 13, 1992; traveled to Cleveland Museum of Art, February 3-April 11, 1993, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, May 23-August 8, 1993, cat. 44.

London, Tate Gallery, John Singer Sargent, October 15, 1998-January 11, 1999, traveled to National Gallery, Washington, D.C. February 28-May 31, 1999, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, June 23-September 26, 1999. Stanford, Clifornia, Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, The Changing Garden: European and American Gardens and Parks, June 11-September 7, 2003. Canberra, Australia, National Gallery of Australia, The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, March 12–June 14, 2004; traveled to Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, July 9–September 12, 2004. London, National Portrait Gallery, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, February 12-May 25, 2015; traveled to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 29-October 4, 2015, cat. 83.

Publication History Giselle D’Unger, “The Chicago Beautiful—Woman and Art The Vital Forces,” Fine Arts Journal, 30 (January-June 1914), p. 302, ill. “Gifts of the Friends,” Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 7 (April 1914), p. 158, ill. General Catalogue of Paintings, Sculpture and Other Objects in the Museum, (Chicago, 1914), p. 158, ill. The Art Institute of Chicago Handbook of Paintings and Drawings (Chicago, 1920), p. 45. Rose V.S. Berry, “John Singer Sargent: Some of His American Work,” Art and Archaeology, 18 (September 924), p. 100, ill. p. 99. William Howe Downes, John S. Sargent: His Life and Work (Boston, 1925), pp. 62, 227, ill. f. p. 272). A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection (Chicago, 1925), p. 152.

A Guide to the Paintings in the Permanent Collection (Chicago, 1932), p. 170. Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1955), p. 449. Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, 1961), p. 411. Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 75. Tom Armstrong, “The New Field-McCormick Galleries in the Art Institute of Chicago,” Magazine Antiques, 134, 4 (October 1988), pp. 822-835, pl. 19, p. 835 ill. Holland Cotter, “Artists From the New World in Love,” New York Times, Sunday, November 1, 1992. James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein, The Art Institute of Chicago: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture (Chicago / Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 15.

Judith A. Barter et al, American Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I, (Art Institute of Chicago, 1998). Judith A. Barter et al, The Age of American Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2011), no. 39. Lance Mayer et al., "American Painters on Technique: 1860-1945" (J. Paul Getty Museum/Getty Publications, 2013), cover (ill.). Ownership History John Singer Sargent, London, England, 1907; sold to the Art Institute, 1914. Add this item to:

Question: John Singer Sargent worked in which branch of the arts?
Answer: Painting