Sargent, JS

John Singer Sargent (/ˈsɑːrdʒənt/; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925)^[1] was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading 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 Florence to American parents, he was trained in Paris before moving to London, living most of his life in Europe. He enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter. An early submission to the 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 next 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 a 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 re-evaluation 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 Singer (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."^[11] His mother was convinced that traveling around Europe, and visiting museums and churches, would give young Sargent a satisfactory education. Several attempts to have him formally schooled failed, owing mostly to their itinerant life. His mother was a capable amateur artist and his father was a skilled 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...

Sargent's friends and supporters included Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works from Sargent and sought his advice on other acquisitions),^[108] Edward VII,^[109] and Paul César Helleu.

His associations also included Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. Other artists Sargent associated with were Dennis Miller Bunker, James Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey and John Elliott (who also worked on the Boston Public Library murals), Francis David Millet, Joaquín Sorolla and Claude Monet, whom Sargent painted. 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.^[110]

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Critical assessment

Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de Metz

In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which made brilliant references to 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."^[111]

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,"^[112] and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry."^[83] 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.'^[113] It has been suggested that the exotic qualities^[114] 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 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.^[59]

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

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."^[113] 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.^[115]

After such a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's reputation has increased steadily since the 1950s.^[4] In the 1960s, a revival of Victorian art and new scholarship directed at Sargent strengthened his reputation.^[116] 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 major 1999 traveling show that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the National Gallery, London. In 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 2023 the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, California, hosted an exhibition of Sargent's paintings from Spain.^[117][118]

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."^[119][120] 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."^[121]...

John Singer Sargent - Wikipedia