John Singer Sargent

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

John Sargent
École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts
Known forPainting
Notable work
MovementImpressionism

John Singer Sargent (

portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury.[2][3] 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, Spain, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida
.

Born in

Paris Salon in the 1880s, his Portrait of Madame X
, was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter in Paris but instead resulted in scandal. During the year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England, where he continued a successful career as a portrait artist.

From the beginning, Sargent's work is characterized by remarkable technical facility, particularly in his ability to draw with a brush, which in later years inspired admiration as well as criticism for its supposed superficiality. His commissioned works were consistent with the grand manner of portraiture, while his informal studies and landscape paintings displayed a familiarity with Impressionism. In later life, Sargent expressed ambivalence about the restrictions of formal portrait work and devoted much of his energy to mural painting and working en plein air. Art historians generally ignored society artists such as Sargent until the late 20th century.[4]

The exhibition in the 1980s of Sargent's previously hidden male nudes served to spark a reevaluation of his life and work, and its psychological complexity. In addition to the beauty, sensation and innovation of his oeuvre, his same-sex interests, unconventional friendships with women and engagement with race, gender nonconformity and emerging globalism are now viewed as socially and aesthetically progressive and radical.[5]

Early life

Sargent was a descendant of

Epes Sargent, a colonial military leader and jurist. Before John Singer Sargent's birth, his father, FitzWilliam (b. 1820 in Gloucester, Massachusetts), was an eye surgeon at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia from 1844 to 1854. After John's older sister died at the age of two, his mother, Mary Newbold Sargent (née Singer, 1826–1906), suffered a breakdown, and the couple decided to go abroad to recover.[1] They remained nomadic expatriates for the rest of their lives.[6][7]
Although based in Paris, Sargent's parents moved regularly, spending seasons at the sea and at mountain resorts in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.

While Mary was pregnant, they stopped in Florence, Tuscany, because of a cholera epidemic. Sargent was born there in 1856. A year later, his sister Mary was born. After her birth, FitzWilliam reluctantly resigned his post in Philadelphia and accepted his wife's request to remain abroad.[8] They lived modestly on a small inheritance and savings, leading a quiet life with their children. They generally avoided society and other Americans, except for friends in the art world.[9] Four more children were born abroad, of whom only two lived past childhood.[10]

Although 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 quite a close observer of animated nature."

medical illustrator.[12] Early on, she gave him sketchbooks and encouraged drawing excursions. Sargent worked on his drawings, and he enthusiastically copied images from The Illustrated London News of ships and made detailed sketches of landscapes.[13]
FitzWilliam had hoped that his son's interest in ships and the sea might lead him toward 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".[14] At the age of thirteen, he received some watercolor lessons from Carl Welsch, a German landscape painter.[15] Although his education was far from complete, Sargent grew up to be a highly literate and cosmopolitan young man, accomplished in art, music, and literature.[16] He was fluent in English, 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).[17] 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 Michelangelo and Titian."[18]

Training

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

An attempt to study at the Academy of Florence failed, as the school was reorganizing at the time. After returning to Paris from Florence, Sargent began his art studies with the young French portraitist Carolus-Duran. Following a meteoric rise, the artist was noted for his bold technique and modern teaching methods; his influence would be pivotal to Sargent during the period from 1874 to 1878.[19]

In 1874, Sargent passed on his first attempt the rigorous exam required to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the premier art school in France. He took drawing classes, which included anatomy and perspective, and gained a silver prize.[19][20] He also spent much time in self-study, drawing in museums and painting in a studio he shared with James Carroll Beckwith. He became both a valuable friend and Sargent's primary connection with the American artists abroad.[21] Sargent also took some lessons from Léon Bonnat.[20]

Fanny Watts, Sargent's childhood friend. The first painting at Paris Salon, 1877, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Carolus-Duran's

alla prima method of working directly on the canvas with a loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez. It was an approach that relied on the proper placement of tones of paint. Sargent would later create a painting in this style that prompted comments such as: "The student has surpassed the teacher."[22]

This approach also permitted spontaneous flourishes of color not bound to an

Whistler
.

An Out-of-Doors Study, 1889, depicting Paul César Helleu sketching with his wife Alice Guérin. The Brooklyn Museum, New York

Sargent's early enthusiasm was for

Salon
, and gaining commissions to earn a livelihood.

Fishing for Oysters at Cançale (a.k.a. En route pour la pêche or Setting Out to Fish), 1878, National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Sargent's first major portrait was of his friend Fanny Watts in 1877, and was also his first Salon admission. Its particularly well-executed pose drew attention.[23] His second salon entry was the Oyster Gatherers of Cançale, an impressionistic painting of which he made two copies, one of which he sent back to the United States, and both received warm reviews.[24]

Early career

El Jaleo (Spanish Dancer), 1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

In 1879 at the age of 23, Sargent painted a portrait of his 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.[25] 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".[26]

After leaving Carolus-Duran's atelier, Sargent visited Spain. There he studied the paintings of Velázquez with a passion, absorbing the master's technique, and in his travels gathered ideas for future works.[27] 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 became a strong advocate for modern composers, especially Gabriel Fauré.[28]

Venetian onion seller, 1880—1882, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

Trips to Italy provided sketches and ideas for several Venetian street-scene

genre paintings, which effectively captured gestures and postures he would find useful in later portraiture.[29]

Upon his return to Paris, Sargent quickly received several portrait commissions. His career was launched. He immediately demonstrated the concentration and stamina that 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 turned down unsatisfactory sitters.[30] He mentored his friend Emil Fuchs, who was learning to paint portraits in oils.[31]

Works

See also: List of works by John Singer Sargent

Portraits

Nineteenth-century 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 (1880) (done en plein-air) and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux (1881). He continued to receive positive critical notice.[32]

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 that echoes Velázquez's Las Meninas.[33] 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. One of his most widely exhibited and best loved works of the 1880s was Lady with the Rose (1882), a portrait of Charlotte Burckhardt, a close friend and possible romantic attachment.[34]

Portrait of Madame X
Main article: Portrait of Madame X
John Singer Sargent in his studio with Portrait of Madame X, c. 1885

His most controversial work, Portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (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."[35] When unveiled in Paris at the 1884 Salon, it aroused such a negative reaction that it likely prompted Sargent's move to London. Sargent's self-confidence had led him to attempt a risque experiment in portraiture—but this time it unexpectedly backfired.[36]

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. Sargent wrote to a common acquaintance:[37]

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.[38] The first version of the portrait of Madame Gautreau, with the famously plunging neckline, white-powdered skin, and arrogantly cocked head, featured an intentionally suggestive off-the-shoulder dress strap, on her right side only, which made the overall effect more daring and sensual.[39] Sargent repainted the strap to its expected over-the-shoulder position to try to dampen the furor, but the damage had been done. French commissions dried up and he told his friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he contemplated giving up painting for music or business.[40]

Writing of the reaction of visitors, Judith Gautier observed:[41]

Is it a woman? a chimera, the figure of a

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 Madame X scandal of 1884, Sargent 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 after moving to the United States, and a few months after Gautreau's death.

Move to England
Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Before arriving 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 complete his move to London in 1886, where he settled in the artistic community of Chelsea.[42]

Notwithstanding the Madame X scandal, he had considered moving to London as early as 1882; he had been urged to do so repeatedly by his new friend, the novelist Henry James. In retrospect his transfer to London may be seen to have been inevitable.[43]

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, however, Sargent soon gained the admiration of English patrons and critics.[44] Henry James also gave the artist "a push to the best of my ability".[45]

Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood, 1885, Tate Britain, London

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 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. His Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood is rendered in his own version of the Impressionist style. In the 1880s, 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 works for his personal collection during that time.[46]

Sargent was similarly inspired to do a portrait of his artist friend Paul César 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.[47] Through Helleu, Sargent met and painted the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, a rather somber portrait reminiscent of works by Thomas Eakins.[48] Although 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."[49]

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885—86, Tate Britain, London.

Sargent's first major success at the

Tate Gallery
.

His first trip to New York and Boston as a professional artist in 1887–88 produced over 20 important commissions, including portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famed Boston art patron. His portrait of Mrs. Adrian Iselin, wife of a New York businessman, revealed her character in one of his most insightful works. In Boston, Sargent was honored with his first solo exhibition, which presented 22 of his paintings.[50] Here he became friends with painter Dennis Miller Bunker, who traveled to England in the summer of 1888 to paint with him en plein air, and is the subject of Sargent's 1888 painting Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot.

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 which he carried out, Sargent would visit the client's home to see where the painting was to hang. He 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.[51] He usually required eight to ten sittings from his clients, although 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 laid down oil paint directly.[52] Finally, he would select an appropriate frame.

Sargent had no assistants; he handled all the tasks, such as preparing his canvases, varnishing the painting, arranging for photography, shipping, and documentation. He commanded about $5,000 per portrait, or about $130,000 in current dollars.[53] Some American clients traveled to London at their own expense to have Sargent paint their portrait. The range of pigments regularly used by Sargent was: "Mars yellow (a synthetic iron oxide) and

ivory black, sienna and Mars brown".[54]

Around 1890, Sargent painted two daring non-commissioned portraits as show pieces—one of actress

Royal Academy
, and was made a full member three years later.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1893, Scottish National Gallery
, Edinburgh.

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 (

Van Dyck of our times".[56]

Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits. Sargent exhibited nine of his portraits in the

Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.[57]

Sargent painted a series of three portraits of

I. N. Phelps Stokes, by Sargent, as a wedding gift.[61][62] Jean Zimmerman documents the creation of the Stokes portrait in her dual biography of the couple, Love, Fiercely.[63]

In 1898, Asher 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 Wertheimer portraits reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his subjects. Even though Wertheimer bequeathed most of the paintings to the National Gallery,[64] nowadays they are on display at the Tate Britain.

Twentieth century portraits

By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist

Whistler did not approve of the looseness of Sargent's brushwork, which he summed up as "smudge everywhere".[67] 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.[68] In 1901, he purchased the next door property to his home in Tite Street, to create a larger studio.[42]

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."

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.[70]

Sargent made several summer visits to the Swiss Alps with his sisters Emily Sargent, an accomplished painter in her own right, and Violet Sargent (Mrs Ormond) and also Violet's daughters Rose-Marie and Reine, who were the subject of a number of paintings between 1906 and 1913 like The Black Brook (1908) or Nonchaloir (Repose) (1911).[71]

Nonchaloir (Repose). The model is Rose-Marie Ormond Michel, Sargent's niece.

By the time Sargent finished his portrait of

Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I like."[73]

Sometime between 1917 and 1920, Sargent painted the portrait of Thomas E. McKeller, a young African-American elevator operator and WWI veteran. The canvas was kept in the painter's studio until his death and only began to be displayed permanently to the public in 1986 when it was acquired by the

Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. McKeller also posed as a model for the mythological murals that Sargent painted at the stairway and the rotunda of the MFA Boston and for the World War I memorial murals at Harvard's Widener Library.[74]

In 1925, shortly before he died, Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of aristocrat Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston. The painting was purchased in 1936 by the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it has been on display since then.[75]

Watercolors

Media related to Watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent at Wikimedia Commons

Gourds, 1906—1910, Brooklyn Museum.

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. 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

American West
, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

The Chess Game, c. 1907, Private Collection.

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).[77] His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905.[78] In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum.[79] Evan Charteris wrote in 1927:[80]

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".

Although 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.[81]

Other work

Atlas and the Hesperides, 1922—1925, mural, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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.[82]

All of Sargent's murals are to be found in the Boston/Cambridge area in Massachusetts. They are in the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard's Widener Library. Sargent's largest scale works are the mural decorations Triumph of Religion that grace the Boston Public Library, depicting the history of religion and the gods of polytheism.[83] They were attached to the walls of the library by means of marouflage. He worked on the cycle for almost thirty years but never completed the final mural. Sargent drew on his extensive travels and museum visits to create a dense art historical mélange. The murals were most recently restored in 2003–2004 by a team from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.[84]

Synagogue, 1919, mural, Boston Public Library

Sargent worked on the murals from 1895 through 1919; they were intended to show religion's (and society's) progress from pagan superstition up through the ascension of Christianity, concluding with a painting depicting Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. But Sargent's paintings of "The Church" and "The Synagogue", installed in late 1919, inspired a debate about whether the artist had represented Judaism in a stereotypical, or even an anti-Semitic, manner.[85] Drawing upon iconography that was used in medieval paintings, Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a blind, ugly hag, and Christianity and the church as a lovely, radiant young woman. He also failed to understand how these representations might be problematic for the Jews of Boston; he was both surprised and hurt when the paintings were criticized.[86] The paintings were objectionable to Boston Jews since they seemed to show Judaism defeated, and Christianity triumphant.[87] The Boston newspapers also followed the controversy, noting that while many found the paintings offensive, not everyone agreed. In the end, Sargent abandoned his plan to finish the murals, and the controversy eventually died down.

Upon his return to England in 1918 after a visit to the United States, 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.[88] Sargent had been affected by the death of his niece Rose-Marie in the shelling of the St Gervais church, Paris, on Good Friday 1918.[71]

Relationships and personal life

Sargent was a life-long bachelor with a wide circle of friends, including

Violet Paget[90] and his likely lover Albert de Belleroche. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent.[91] However, recent scholarship has theorised he was a private, complex and passionate man whose homosexual identity was integral to shaping his art.[92][93] This view is based on statements by his friends and associates, the general alluring remoteness of his portraits, the way his works challenge 19th-century notions of gender difference,[94] his previously ignored male nudes, and some male portraits, including those of Thomas E. McKeller, Bartholomy Maganosco, Olimpio Fusco,[95] and that of aristocratic artist Albert de Belleroche, which hung in his Chelsea dining room.[96][97] Sargent had a long friendship with Belleroche, whom he met in 1882 and traveled with frequently. A surviving drawing suggests Sargent might have used him as a model for Madame X, following a coincidence of dates for Sargent drawing each of them separately around the same time,[98]
and the delicate pose suggestive more of Sargent's sketches of the male form than his often stiff commissions.

It has been suggested that Sargent's reputation in the 1890s as "the painter of the Jews" may have been due to his empathy with and complicit enjoyment of their mutual social foreignness.[92] One such Jewish client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice, Sargent "was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers".[92][99] The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after Sargent's death that his sex life "was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger."[100]

He had many relationships with women. It has been suggested that those with his sitters Rosina Ferrara, Virginie Gautreau, and Judith Gautier may have tipped into infatuation.[101] As a young man, Sargent also for a time courted Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose.[102]

Sargent's friends and supporters included

Francis David Millet, Joaquín Sorolla, and Claude Monet, whom Sargent portrayed with Monet's wife "by the edge of a wood".[105] Between 1905 and 1914, Sargent's frequent traveling companions were the married artist couple Wilfrid de Glehn and Jane Emmet de Glehn. The trio would often spend summers in France, Spain, or Italy, and all three would depict one another in their paintings during their travels.[106]

  • Rosina, 1878, depicting Rosina Ferrara
    Rosina, 1878, depicting Rosina Ferrara
  • Bartolomeo Magagnosco, c. 1875
    Bartolomeo Magagnosco, c. 1875
  • Life Study (Study of an Egyptian Girl), c. 1891
    Life Study (Study of an Egyptian Girl), c. 1891
  • Olimpio Fusco, c. 1905–15
    Olimpio Fusco, c. 1905–15

Critical assessment

Musées de Metz

In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on

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".[107] In 1916, he was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University.[108]

Still, during his life his work engendered negative responses from some of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer",[109] and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry".[79] 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. Elizabeth 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.'[110] It has been suggested that the exotic qualities[111] inherent in his work appealed to the sympathies of the Jewish clients whom he painted from the 1890s on.

Sargent emphasized Almina Wertheimer's exotic beauty in 1908 by dressing her en turquerie.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait

tambura, 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.[112]

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."[110] And, in the 1930s, 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.[113]

After such a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's reputation has increased steadily since the 1950s.

National Gallery, London. In 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and in 2023 the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, California, hosted an exhibition of Sargent's paintings from Spain.[115][116]

In 1986, Andy Warhol commented to Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother that Sargent "made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, every one of them has a different mood."[117][118] In a Time magazine article from the 1980s, 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".[119]

Later life

Sargent's grave in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey

In 1922, Sargent co-founded New York City's

Woking, Surrey.[122]

Memorial exhibitions of Sargent's work were held 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.[123][full citation needed] The Grand Central Art Galleries also organized a posthumous exhibition in 1928 of previously unseen sketches and drawings from throughout his career.[124]

Sales

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife was sold in 2004 for US$8.8 million[125] and is located at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at Bentonville, Arkansas.

In December 2004, Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905) sold for US$23.5 million, nearly double the Sotheby's estimate of $12 million. The previous highest price for a Sargent painting was US$11 million.[126][full citation needed]

In popular culture

In 2018, Comedy Central star Jade Esteban Estrada wrote, directed, and starred in Madame X: A Burlesque Fantasy, a stage production (premiered in San Antonio, Texas) based on the life of Sargent and his famous painting, Portrait of Madame X.[127]

The works of Sargent feature prominently in Maggie Stiefvater's 2021 novel Mister Impossible.

In 2024, Exhibition on Screen produced a documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion & Swagger, filmed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Tate Britain, London.[128] It was based on the Sargent and fashion exhibits at those two museums in 2023 and 2024.

Citations

  1. ^
    Biography.com. Archived from the original
    on September 25, 2018. Retrieved September 25, 2018.
  2. ^ "While his art matched to the spirit of the age, Sargent came into his own in the 1890s as the leading portrait painter of his generation". Ormond (1998), p. 34.
  3. ^ "At the time of the Wertheimer commission Sargent was the most celebrated, sought-after and expensive portrait painter in the world". New Orleans Museum of Art (Archived April 20, 2008, at the Wayback Machine)
  4. ^ a b Schulze, Franz (1980). "J. S. Sargent, Partly Great". Art in America. Vol. 68, no. 2. pp. 90–96.
  5. ^ Fisher (2022), p. 9.
  6. ^ Olson (1986), p. 1.
  7. ^ Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Sargent, Paul Dudley" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
  8. ^ Olson (1986), p. 2.
  9. ^ Olson (1986), p. 4.
  10. ^ xxxx, p. 11.
  11. ^ Olson (1986), p. 9.
  12. ^ Olson (1986), p. 10.
  13. ^ Olson (1986), p. 15.
  14. ^ Olson (1986), p. 18.
  15. ^ Little (1998), p. 7.
  16. ^ Olson (1986), p. 23.
  17. ^ Olson (1986), p. 27.
  18. ^ Olson (1986), p. 29.
  19. ^ a b Fairbrother (1994), p. 13.
  20. ^ a b Little (1998), p. 7.
  21. ^ a b Olson (1986), p. 46.
  22. ^ Elizabeth Prettejohn: Interpreting Sargent, p. 9. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998.
  23. ^ a b Olson (1986), p. 55.
  24. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 16.
  25. ^ Prettejohn (1998), p. 14.
  26. ^ Prettejohn (1998), p. 13.
  27. ^ Olson (1986), p. 70.
  28. ^ Olson (1986), p. 73.
  29. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 33.
  30. ^ Olson (1986), p. 80.
  31. ^ "Emil Fuchs papers 1880–1931" (PDF). Brooklyn Museum. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 25, 2015. Retrieved November 7, 2013.
  32. ^ Ormond, Richard: "Sargent's Art", John Singer Sargent, pp. 25–7. Tate Gallery, 1998.
  33. ^ Ormond (1998), p. 27, 1998.
  34. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 40.
  35. ^ Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. 114.
  36. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 45.
  37. ^ Olson (1986), p. 102.
  38. ^ Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. 113.
  39. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 47.
  40. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 55.
  41. ^ Cited in Ormond (1998), pp. 27–8, 1998.
  42. ^ a b "Settlement and building: Artists and Chelsea Pages 102-106 A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 12, Chelsea". British History Online. Victoria County History, 2004. Retrieved December 21, 2022.
  43. ^ Ormond (1998), p. 28, 1998.
  44. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 43.
  45. ^ Olson (1986), p. 107.
  46. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 61.
  47. ^ Olson (1986), plate XVIII
  48. ^ Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. 151.
  49. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 68.
  50. ^ Fairbrother (1994), pp. 70–2.
  51. ^ Olson (1986), p. 223.
  52. ^ Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. xxiii.
  53. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 76, price updated by CPI calculator to 2008 at data.bls.gov
  54. ^ "John Singer Sargent's Painting Techniques". Keene Wilson Fine Art (Blog). Retrieved April 14, 2023.[unreliable source?]
  55. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 79.
  56. ^ Ormond (1998), pp. 28–35, 1998.
  57. ^ John Singer Sargent at the World's Columbian Exposition, World's Fair Chicago 1893.
  58. ^ "Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife". JSS Virtual Gallery. Retrieved July 27, 2017.
  59. ^ "John Singer Sargent | Henry G. Marquand | American". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved September 11, 2023.
  60. Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas
  61. ^ "John Singer Sargent 1856–1925. Mr and Mrs IN Phelps Stokes 1897, Oil on canvas". Studios and portraits – Queensland Art Gallery – Gallery of Modern Art. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011. Retrieved September 3, 2011.
  62. ^ "Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, 1897, by John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). Oil on canvas". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2011. Retrieved September 3, 2011.
  63. ISBN 978-0-15-101447-7
    .
  64. ^ Ormond (1998), p. 148, 1998.
  65. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 97.
  66. ^ Little (1998), p. 12.
  67. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 101.
  68. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 118.
  69. ^ Olson (1986), p. 227.
  70. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 124.
  71. ^ a b McCouat, Philip. "Rose-Marie Ormond Sargent's Muse and 'the Most Charming Girl That Ever Lived'". Journal of Art in Society. Retrieved July 8, 2020.
  72. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 131.
  73. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 133.
  74. ^ "Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKellery and John Singer Sargent by Nathaniel Silver".
  75. ^ "EmbARK Web Kiosk". Archived from the original on September 28, 2007.
  76. ^ Little (1998), p. 11.
  77. ^ Prettejohn (1998), pp. 66–69.
  78. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 148.
  79. ^ a b Ormond (1998), p. 276, 1998.
  80. ^ Little (1998), p. 110.
  81. ^ Little (1998), p. 17.
  82. ^ "Exhibitions – 1916, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, hosted at the Grafton Galleries". www.jssgallery.org.
  83. ^ The Sargent Murals at the Boston Public Library Archived June 2, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
  84. ^ Khandekar, Pocobene & Smith (2009).
  85. ^ "New Painting at Public Library Stirs Jews to Vigorous Protest". Donald Hendersonsyn The Boston Globe, November 9, 1919, p. 48.
  86. ^ "BPL - Art -- Sargent Murals". Archived from the original on October 6, 2012. Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  87. ^ "Jenna Weissman Joselit: Restoring the 'American Sistine Chapel'... How Sargent's 'Synagogue' Provoked a Nation – Forward.com". The Jewish Daily Forward. August 4, 2010.
  88. ^ Little (1998), p. 135.
  89. ^ "At Home with Wilde, Sargent, and Whistler", Londonist, 2014
  90. ^ Everett, Lucinda (March 8, 2018). "Too 'dangerous' for Henry James: Violet Paget, the radical lesbian writer who shook the art world". The Daily Telegraph.
  91. ^ Olson (1986), p. 199.
  92. ^ a b c Failing, Patricia, "The Hidden Sargent", Art News, May 2001
  93. ^ Davis (2003b), p. 254.
  94. ^ Moss, Dorothy, "John Singer Sargent, 'Madame X' and 'Baby Millbank'", The Burlington Magazine, May 2001, Vol. 143, No. 1178.
  95. ^ Little (1998), p. 141.
  96. ^ Tóibín, Colm, "The secret life of John Singer Sargent", The Daily Telegraph, February 15, 2015.
  97. ^ Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. 88.
  98. ^ Diliberto, Gioia. "Sargent's Muses: Was Madam X Actually a Mister?", The New York Times, May 18, 2003.
  99. ^ Fairbrother (2000), p. 220, n. 7.
  100. ^ Fairbrother (2000), p. 139, n. 4.
  101. ^ Davis (2003b), pp. 143–145.
  102. ^ Olson (1986), p. 88.
  103. ISBN 978-0-7892-0384-7
    .
  104. ISBN 978-0-7892-0384-7
    .
  105. ^ "Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood", Tate Britain.
  106. ^ "The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy". Archived from the original on July 10, 2012.
  107. ^ This from Auguste Rodin, upon seeing The Misses Hunter in 1902. Ormond & Kilmurray (1998), p. 150.
  108. ^ University, Harvard. "History of honorary degrees". Harvard University. Retrieved May 21, 2024.
  109. ^ Rewald, John: Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, p. 183. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
  110. ^ a b Prettejohn (1998), p. 73.
  111. ^ Sargent's friend Vernon Lee referred to the artist's "outspoken love of the exotic ... the unavowed love of rare kinds of beauty, for incredible types of elegance". Charteris (1927), p. 252.
  112. ^ Ormond (1998), pp. 169–171, 1998.
  113. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 140.
  114. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 141.
  115. ^ "Sargent and Spain".
  116. ^ "Sargent and Spain".
  117. ^ "John Singer Sargent". Archived from the original on March 20, 2012. Retrieved July 31, 2012.
  118. ^ Fairbrother, Trevor (February 1987). "Warhol Meets Sargent at Whitney". Arts Magazine. No. 6. pp. 64–71.
  119. ^ Fairbrother (1994), p. 145.
  120. ^ "Painters and Sculptors' Gallery Association to Begin Work", The New York Times, December 19, 1922.
  121. ^
    ISBN 0-8109-1811-0
    .
  122. ^ "John Singer Sargent". Necropolis Notables. Brookwood Cemetery Society. Archived from the original on September 17, 2016. Retrieved February 23, 2007.
  123. ^ "Tate – Website undergoing maintenance".
  124. ^ "Taken from Sargent's Sketchbook". The New York Times. February 12, 1928.
    "Sargent Sketches in New Exhibit Here". The New York Times. February 14, 1928.
  125. ^ "Sotheby's: Fine Art Auctions & Private Sales for Contemporary, Modern & Impressionist, Old Master Paintings, Jewellery, Watches, Wine, Decorative Arts, Asian Art & more – Sotheby's". Archived from the original on August 7, 2016. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
  126. ^ The Age, December 3, 2004.
  127. ^ "Madame X: A Burlesque Fantasy". TheOvertimeTheatre.org. San Antonio, Texas: Overtime Theater.
  128. ^ "John Singer Sargent: Fashion & Swagger review – exploring the artist’s work in style".

Works cited

Further reading

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to John Singer Sargent.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Singer_Sargent&oldid=1227113908"