Date: Fri 23-Apr-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDIR

Quick Words:

Sargent

Full Text:

AA LEAD: John Singer Sargent National Gallery Of Art

with cuts

By Stephen May

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Considered by many to be the greatest painter of his era,

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has had a fluctuating reputation since his

death. In some respects the victim of his own ostentatious technical

brilliance, over the years critics have contended that his work was too

facile, aristocratic and superficial to stand the test of time.

Recently there has been growing appreciation for his extraordinary

achievements and the special quality of his oeuvre, sentiments that are bound

to be enhanced by a splendid exhibition now on tour in the United States. It

should put to rest quibbles about Sargent's work and assure him a place at the

very front ranks of American artists.

"John Singer Sargent," the first major retrospective since a memorial

exhibition in 1926, comprises over 100 paintings, watercolors and works on

paper, including many of his most beautiful and important works. It was

organized by London's Tate Gallery where it opened last fall; the National

Gallery of Art, where it will be seen through May 31; and the Museum of Fine

Arts in Boston, where it can be viewed from June 23 to September 26.

Curated by Sargent's great-nephew, Richard Ormond, director of England's

National Maritime Museum, and Elaine Kilmurray, co-author with Ormond of the

Sargent catalogue raisonne, the show assembles works from every phase of the

artist's career. Kilmurray and Ormond's exhibition catalogue is outstanding,

with 200 reproductions and essays examining Sargent's life and development as

an artist.

The complementary exhibition of 60 Sargent drawings from the permanent

collection of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art is on view there through

May 9. This is a remarkable showcase for Sargent's precocious and continually

exemplary gifts as a draftsman.

This future international superstar emerged from the somewhat financially

reduced branch of a prosperous New England mercantile family. By the time he

was born in Florence, Italy in 1856, Sargent's moody father had abandoned his

medical practice in Philadelphia and, at the urging of his strong-willed,

wealthy wife, had taken up a peripatetic existence in Europe. His mother was

an accomplished musician and amateur artist.

Raised in the cultured, overseas milieu favored by Henry James in his novels,

young Sargent led a nomadic life as he traveled with his parents around the

Continent. While he received little formal education, his experiences

contributed to his cosmopolitan polish as an observer of people and places.

Sargent's father envisioned a naval career for his son, but encouraged by his

mother, he took up art, studying briefly in Italy and sketching from nature as

he moved around Europe.

In 1874, the tall and reserved but vigorous and ambitious teenager settled in

Paris, where he trained in painting with the fashionable academic portraitist,

Charles-Emile-Auguste Duran, who called himself Carolus-Duran. Sargent learned

to paint directly on canvas, seeking to capture the essential features of

subjects through spontaneous brushwork, a subdued palette and vivid contrasts

between light and dark. Carolus-Duran's enthusiasm for the work of Spanish

master Diego Velazquez informed the art of the younger man throughout his

career. Sargent's assured, informal portrait of Carolus-Duran (1879), painted

when he was 23, reflected both his maturity as an artist and his break from

the conventional style of his French master.

While laboring to hone his skills, Sargent cast a canny eye on the art world

around him, particularly the annual Paris Salon, where up-and-coming artists

could establish their reputations. Deciding that his best chance as a newcomer

was via a genre work, in the summer of 1877 the young American made a series

of sketches of fisherfolk on the Brittany coast. The resulting "Oyster

Gatherers of Cancale" (1878), a bright, freely-brushed canvas, showed a group

of women and children carrying baskets across a beach. The sizable painting

won high praise at the Salon of 1878. It is now a treasured holding of the

Corcoran Gallery. The next year, in the luminous, subtly-hued "In the

Luxembourg Gardens" (1879), Sargent gave a Whistlerian touch to an

oft-depicted site that was at the center of Parisian social life.

Before long, flush with his initial successes and urged on by Carolus-Duran,

Sargent traveled to Spain to study the work of Velazquez at first hand. Out of

this intense exposure to Spanish art and culture came the large and

spectacular "The Spanish Dance" (1879), a celebration of couples doing the

tango under a sparkling nocturnal sky, and one of his greatest masterpieces,

"El Jaleo."

As the artist hoped, "El Jaleo" caused a stir at the 1882 Salon, and continues

to this day to stimulate effusive admiration. It occupies a special niche at

the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; Mrs Gardner, whom Sargent

depicted in two memorable likenesses, was a fervent supporter and patron of

the painter.

Inspired by a two-month sojourn in Morocco in 1880, Sargent painted "Fumee

d'ambre gris." A haunting portrayal of a mysterious North African woman

perfuming herself with ambergris, this strikingly modern composition was

displayed at the 1880 Salon.

Back in Paris in the early 1880s, Sargent decided it was time to try

portraiture as his next vehicle for getting ahead. Over the next several years

he executed a number of widely exhibited likenesses of Parisian residents that

are among the finest of his career.

Sargent's first life-sized, full-length male portrait, "Dr Pozzi at Home"

(1881) was of a Parisian doctor said to include among his lovers actress Sarah

Bernhardt and socialite Madame Pierre Gautreau. In keeping with his subject's

flamboyant reputation, the painter had Pozzi strike a self-assured pose and

abandoned his muted palette in favor of rendering a startlingly red dressing

gown against a crimson carpet and drape.

During several lengthy stays in Venice around this time, Sargent painted a

group of rather unusual genre pictures focusing on working class women and

sinister, cloaked men in darkened alleys and cool, expansive interiors. They

appear to be experiments in Frans Hals-like color harmonies and

Velazquez-inspired spatial strategies.

In the most sexually charged of these works, "The Sulphur Match" (1882), a

young girl tips back in her chair while looking flirtatiously at her male

companion lighting a cigarette. This dramatically-lit cafe scene is

reminiscent of Sargent's earlier epic, "El Jaleo."

Sargent's interest in the work of Hals and Velazquez reverberates in the

magnificent "The Daughters of Edward D. Boit" (1882), a compelling and complex

modern group portrait that also bears the influences of Edgar Degas and

Edouard Manet.

The subjects, children of rich New Englanders who traveled regularly in

Europe, ranged in age from four to 14 and were shown in their cavernous Paris

apartment. This work marks the emergence of psychological nuance in Sargent's

work, and remains a grand and interesting image.

The expatriate American's ascension to the top of the French art world came to

an abrupt end with the unveiling of his notorious homage to Madame Gautreau,

the Louisiana-born wife of a Paris banker. A beauty famed for her stunning

looks, unorthodox clothes and ostentatious presence at social gatherings, she

was avidly sought by Sargent as a portrait subject. He saw in her a fresh

opportunity to make a splash at the Salon.

After much effort, the eager painter and his rather indolent sitter evolved a

likeness, slyly entitled "Madame X" (1884), in which she assumed a haughty

profile pose, with one strap of her black, decollete gown brazenly slipped off

her shoulder. This daring realism, combined with the sensuality of the

likeness, prompted even blase Parisians to conclude that the upstart American

artist had gone too far.

The ensuing uproar stunned Sargent, who sought to make amends after the Salon

closed by repainting the strap in an acceptable vertical position, but the

damage had been done. His bold effort to challenge the conventions of

portraiture had backfired, compromising his carefully nurtured prospects for

continuing artistic and financial success in France.

Unwilling to buck the tide of hostility, Sargent decided to leave Paris and,

after considering Boston and New York, settled permanently in London. He had

just turned 30 when he established himself in Whistler's old studio on Tite

Street. It was to be the scene of his greatest triumphs, but at first the

expatriate American was regarded with suspicion by the British, his works

dismissed as too French and too modern in that stronghold of the

tradition-bound Royal Academy.

His distinguished fellow expatriate, Henry James, already well established in

English society, helped break the ice for Sargent. The esteemed writer admired

the young artist's work and liked him personally. Describing Sargent as

"civilised to his fingertips," James energetically introduced him to his wide

circle of acquaintances in the arts, the intelligentsia and politics.

In a perceptive essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1887, James made the

acute observation that at the end of Sargent's first decade of work he offered

the "slightly `uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of

its career has nothing more to learn."

Building on this flattering advocacy, Sargent worked prodigiously, and soon

flourished. In the closing years of the 1880s, he traveled around England,

creating plein-air landscapes, figure studies, river scenes and still lifes.

Among the most beautiful works of this period is the colorful "Poppies"

(1886), recalling an effulgent flower bed in the British countryside.

During this time he painted "Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose" (1885-86), the

breakthrough canvas that was a resounding success at the Royal Academy

exhibition of 1887 and won over skeptical Britons. Like "El Jaleo," his great

Salon extravaganza of five years before, Sargent never painted anything like

this again.

"Carnation" shows two pretty girls in white smocks standing in a darkening

garden and lighting Oriental paper lanterns that mirror the surrounding,

glowing flowers. The bright colors, decorative touches and poetic treatment of

light and mood beguiled English observers at the 1887 show.

Somewhat before this triumph, Sargent had experimented with various

Impressionist techniques, inspired by mid-1880s visits to French titan Claude

Monet at Giverny. He paid tribute to his friend and the craft of plein-air

painting in "Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood" (1885).

After the success of "Carnation" Sargent was regarded as the preeminent

Impressionist in Great Britain. While many of his canvases suggest his

interest in the play of natural light and employ a high-keyed palette and

broken brush work, he always retained the human figure as the central focus of

his visual attention, as in "Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife" (1889).

Helleu and his young bride visited Sargent in the countryside and posed for

this precisely delineated picture beside the River Avon.

Sargent's initial successes as a portrait painter came not in England, but in

the United States, during sojourns in the late 1880s in New York and Boston.

Welcomed and lionized, especially in Boston, he was soon flooded with

commissions to paint likenesses of wealthy, well-connected sitters.

Before long he became the portraitist of choice in both Gilded Age America and

Edwardian England. His grand manner style; soft, buttery brushwork; insights

into personality and virtuosity in recording the sheen of dresses and drapery

proved irresistible to the beautiful people of his era.

The combination of his flattering likenesses, international viewpoint and

brilliant style were in stark contrast to the prosaic academic manner of his

counterparts, particularly in Britain, and brought him all the patrons he

could handle. Criss-crossing the Atlantic for decades, Sargent carried out the

almost endless stream of portrait commissions that came his way.

In his first group portrait of adults and one of his first important English

commissions was "The Misses Vickers" (1884), showing the three daughters of

the famous armament manufacturer in an innovative composition. Highlighting

the three young women against the dark interior of a room, Sargent conveyed a

sense of nervous tension among the sisters that belied their air of repose and

elegant setting.

He achieved notable early successes in England with several portraits of

Robert Louis Stevenson, the frail, intense Scottish author. Somewhat offbeat

in composition, as befits their subject, the Stevenson likenesses are triumphs

of informality and insight.

In 1898 Sargent painted portraits of powerful Bond Street dealer Asher

Wertheimer and his wife. The former likeness is an extraordinarily perceptive

picture, capturing the good humor and relaxed presence of the affluent sitter,

while the poodle with lolling tongue at the lower left serves as a foil to his

master.

Wertheimer became a good friend and Sargent's greatest patron, commissioning

additional portraits of his wife and children. "Ena and Betty, Daughters of

Asher and Mrs Wertheimer" (1901) is a particularly vital rendering of two

alluring young women, dressed to the nines, surrounded by the trappings of

wealth in the luxurious interior of their father's London drawing room.

By the turn of the century Sargent was approached by members of the

aristocracy, whose forebears had been immortalized by a who's who of British

painters, asking for portraits to hang next to those likenesses in some of

England's grandest country houses. As a result, he executed images of

Edwardian nobility that have come to define that epoch, indeed, too much so in

the view of some critics. Generally, however, these likenesses are appreciated

as invaluable mirrors of Edwardian society and all it meant for England,

In 1906 Sargent completed a self portrait for the Uffizi gallery, which

represented an affirmation of his high international standing. He presented

himself as a bearded, steady-eyed gentleman with a proper high collar and

somber suit and no sign of his profession. As befits the artist's painfully

shy personality, his self-portrait is the least revealing of all the

likenesses he painted. In Florence, it joined a celebrated collection of

self-portraits by such titans of world art as David, Ingres, Michelangelo,

Rembrandt, Titian and Velazquez.

One of the few portraits completed by Sargent after 1910 was a compelling

likeness of his long-time friend and champion, James, which captures the

nervous watchfulness of the celebrated, rotund writer. Instigated by James's

friends to mark his 70th birthday in 1913, this labor of love gave the painter

an opportunity to honor an old compatriot who had tirelessly promoted his

career.

The last great Sargent portrait, created after repeated requests by the

sitter, was "John D. Rockefeller" (1917). Painted at Kykuit, the Rockefeller

house in Tarrytown, N.Y., it depicts the aging oil millionaire and

philanthropist as a frail, ascetic, almost saintly figure looking heavenward.

It suggests Sargent's appreciation for the many philanthropic good deeds of

this famed business titan.

One of the special treats of the exhibition is a rare Sargent conversation

piece, "An Interior in Venice" (1898), painted as a gift to its subjects, Mr

and Mrs Daniel Curtis of Boston and their son, painter Ralph Curtis and his

wife. Set in the Curtis's expansive quarters in the elegant Seventeenth

Century Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, where Sargent stayed when in the city, it

features beams of sunlight dramatically highlighting each figure in the dim

space. Rejected by Mrs Curtis because she felt it made her look too old and

because her son's informal pose offended her sense of decorum, Sargent

presented it to the Royal Academy in London as his diploma work in 1899.

In the last quarter century of his life, weary of catering to the whims of

sitters, Sargent largely abandoned portraiture to concentrate on oil and

watercolor landscape, Alpine figure studies, architectural pictures of gardens

and parks and fountains and statues, and genre scenes and mural work. Much of

his time after 1900 was devoted to extended painting forays to diverse locales

in France, Italy and Switzerland, often accompanied by the family of his

sister, Violet Ormond, and other friends, who frequently acted as models. In

an exquisite, highly expressive oil, "Group with Parasols (A Siesta)" (1905),

he depicted several male and female friends jumbled together in a dreamy,

shared siesta.

Sargent featured two favorite traveling companions, British painter Wilfred de

Glehn and his American-born artist-wife, Jane Emmet, in the setting of one of

his beloved haunts, in the magnificent "The Fountain, Villa Torlonia,

Frascati, Italy" (1907).

The de Glehns also appear in another fine oil, "Villa Torre Galli: The Loggia"

(1910), in which Jane reads in the foreground as Wilfred paints at an easel in

the background of the villa where the Sargent party stopped on the outskirts

of Florence.

Sargent returned often to Venice, where he reveled in depicting canals, campos

and palace facades from different angles and under varying light conditions,

in both oils and watercolors. Some of his finest watercolors were executed

during these sojourns, notable for their spontaneity, freedom, luminosity and

limpid style. Among the best, both painted from the vantage point of a

gondola, are "Scuola di San Rocco" (circa 1903) and "On the Grand Canal"

(circa 1907).

Similar scenes, painted in oil, such as "The Rialto, Venice" (circa 1911) and

"Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice" (circa 1913) demonstrate Sargent's

versatility in portraying his favorite Italian city in different media.

Sargent made Boston his unofficial American base, sojourning there often and

establishing an important circle of friends, sitters and patrons. Around 1890

he was commissioned by the trustees of the Boston Public Library. The

exhibition in Boston will include a number of his sketches and preliminary

work for this project, to which he devoted an enormous amount of time. The

first murals were installed in 1895 and the last in 1916.

Sargent later undertook to decorate the new building of the Museum of Fine

Arts in Boston, and created murals honoring World War I dead in Harvard

University's Widener Library. Thus, Boston has three major mural cycles, all

worth seeing.

In 1918 the British Government asked Sargent to go to the front in France and

record his impressions of the war, especially images of American and British

cooperation. At age 62, the temporary war artist was said to have astonished

the troops with his courage and endurance.

Numerous sketches in the Corcoran exhibition of soldiers, motorcycles, trucks,

cannon trailers, horses and devastated terrain document the quick, meticulous

studies Sargent executed on this assignment.

His monumental oil "Gassed" (1919), on loan from London's Imperial War Museum,

constitutes a moving commentary on the ravages wreaked by poison gas on

British soldiers, which he witnessed first hand in August 1918.

In a highly evocative watercolor, "Crashed Aeroplane" (1918), Sargent depicted

farmers engaged in the timeless ritual of gathering hay, seemingly oblivious

to the disaster of the downed plane in the field behind them. This is one of a

series of wartime watercolors he presented to the Imperial War Museum.

Reflecting the esteem in which he was held on both sides of the Atlantic,

Sargent received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, as well as

Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania. He was showered with medals, prizes and other

honors.

Sargent died of a heart attack in London in 1925. He was 69. A private funeral

and burial in Surrey was followed by an imposing memorial service in

Westminster Abbey. Memorial exhibitions were held in London, New York and

Boston soon thereafter.

Combining keen observation of the world around him with technical brilliance

and entrepreneurial savvy, this premiere Anglophile made himself one of the

leading painters of his era. His portraits offer a substantial visual record

of important American and British personalities of his day, while his

landscapes and superb watercolors display his knack for capturing the spirit

of place with verve and apparent spontaneity.

This knockout exhibition -- underscoring the breadth, quality and depth of

Sargent's oeuvre -- should not be missed. Showcasing works that are not likely

to be seen again in this country for years, it dispels any doubts about the

lasting importance of this artist's work. Ensconced in the hearts of Americans

and Englishmen alike, John Singer Sargent's place among the world's finest

artists should hereafter be secure.

The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW in

Washington; telephone 202/737-4215.