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John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)

In the late 1800's the style of art shifted toward Impressionism, as human form and landscapes became popular subject matter. This, along with the increasing demand for portrait work, helped make John Singer Sargent one of the most prolific painters of the time.

His body of work includes over eight hundred portraits, most in oil, and at least eighteen hundred pictures of landscapes, buildings, and the like (some in watercolor). Add to this the hundreds of sketches from his childhood and his later mural studies, and he stands as an artist who quantitatively surpassed any of his contemporaries.

John Singer Sargent was born on January 12, 1856, in Florence, while his parents were traveling in Italy. As the son of a prosperous American doctor, he gained exposure to international culture and art as his family traveled extensively throughout Europe during his younger years.

Sargent displayed intrinsic drawing ability from an early age. This talent ran in the family--his father illustrated the medical textbooks that he had written himself; and his mother, an amateur watercolorist, often took young John traveling on sketching excursions.

At age 12, Sargent went to Rome to receive art lessons. With this instruction, he created many landscapes and learned how to draw perspectives, complete studies in outlines and light values, and differentiate textural surfaces. When he was 14, he made his first portrait study of his father sitting and writing a letter.

Sargent sketched constantly and filled sketchbooks with pencil drawings of the people, artworks, and landscapes that he observed in his travels. These drawings would later serve as visual notations for the many paintings that he would later create.

His real professional training began in 1873 when he enrolled at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence. Here he met and studied with the artists who would become his contemporary peers. The following year he returned to Paris to prepare for a show at the cole des Beaux-Arts (a school he would later matriculate to).

The drawings and paintings that Sargent produced while at this school gained him considerable attention in the art world. As his reputation grew, he began getting commission offers for portrait work from some of the most renowned people in Europe and America.

Sargent's focus on the detail and the characteristics of human form and expression prepared him well for the many commissioned portraits that he created during his career. He had a unique gift for capturing the essence of the person he was illustrating as well as the dress, decor, and atmosphere in which they were set.

The hundreds that posed for his portraits ranged from titled members of European aristocracy to common people. In America, he painted a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House in 1903. In 1917, he painted President Wilson's portrait for Red Cross charity and later painted an elderly John D. Rockefeller.

Sargent was very involved in the art world and knew just about all of the players. He made many of these relationships as a founding member of the prestigious New English Art Club and as an elected member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters (New York), among significant others. His works were shown the world over, and he was honored with many accolades during his life.

In 1884, Sargent presented his painting "Madame X" (a full-sized oil on canvas of Madame Pierre Gautreau standing in a solitary pose) at the Paris Salon--to mixed reviews. This reception was to be a turning point for the artist, as he shifted his base to London and did not publicly show the piece again until 1905, even though he felt it was his best work ever.

Sargent traveled extensively and often stayed with the families who employed his talents. Other times, he stayed with friends, lived in hotels, or stayed at various houses that either he or his family owned. Sargent's life was rich and diverse: he knew Whistler, befriended and painted with Monet, socialized with literary giants such as Henry James, and sailed the seas with American admirals.

Questions remain whether some of Sargent's works were formally Impressionist. Even though the artist experimented in the late 1800's with the dabs, dots, and swirls of Impressionism, his paintings often remained an amalgam of this style combined with areas of tight clarity and focus, usually centered around facial features. Still, some of his portrait and landscape works from this period are distinctly impressionistic.

Sargent started creating mural works in the early 1890's. He began these large-scale works by planning and painting a series of religiously historic murals for the Boston Public Library in the years 1893 through 1915 (such as "Frieze of the Prophets," "Pagan Deities," and "The Dogma of Redemption"--all oils on canvas). These works led him to paint a mural in the State Capitol rotunda in Harrisburg, PA, (1912) and later paint huge staircase panels for the Widner Memorial Library at Harvard in Boston (1921).

Eventually, time, travel, and heavy workloads started taking a toll on Sargent. Ever in demand, he reluctantly accepted commissioned work to paint a large group of portraits of American war officers in WWI.

Sargent worked and traveled right up to the time of his death. He was on his way to another job when he died in his sleep on April 15, 1925, at age sixty-nine. Most of his portrait works remain as treasured family heirlooms, and the rest are still shown in galleries throughout the world.

"Masters of Color and Light: Homer, Sargent, and the American Watercolor Movement" is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through August 23. One hundred fifty seldom-seen masterpieces from the museum's collection, dating from 1777, may be viewed. (718) 638-5000.

Copyright ARTtalk Vol. 8 No. 9 -- July 1998