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In my world, Sargent is among the finest watercolor painters and one of the most underestimated painters of the 19th century. Technically there was nothing he could not do, that goes without saying. But judgments that he was superficial, conventional or facile are utterly misguided. Sargent used his brilliant technique to explore a uniquely modern artistic theme: time and subjective perception. In his mature paintings, he continually demonstrates the constructive and sketchy nature of our visual experience by the device of creating cohesive, detailed and convincing visual images from distinct, individualized brushstrokes. The problems of perception and visual illusions were foremost in the debates at the turn of the 20th century among psychologists in America and the Continent, and it is impossible to appreciate Sargent's ambition and he was extraordinarily ambitious without placing his technique in that context. Here, for example, are observations from William James's Principles of Psychology (1890): We are constantly selecting certain of our sensations as realities and degrading others to the status of signs of these. When we get one of the signs we think of the reality signified; and the strange thing is that then the reality ... is so interesting that it acquires an hallucinatory strength, which may even eclipse that of the relatively uninteresting sign and entirely divert our attention from the latter. ... Thus the faintest sensations will give rise to the preception of definite things if only they resemble those which the things are wont to arouse. ... The sense of sight, as we have seen in studying Space, is pregnant with illusions. ... No sense gives such fluctuating impressions of the same object as sight does. With no sense are we so apt to treat the sensations immediately given as mere signs; with none is the invocation from memory of a thing, and the consequent perception of the latter, so immediate. ... It is this incessant reduction of our optical objects to more "real" forms which has led some authors into the mistake of thinking that the sensations which first apprehend them are originally and natively of no form at all. ["Sensation" and "The Perception of 'Things'", passim] The implicit critique, in the last sentence, of the homogenous divisions deployed by Seurat or Signac clarifies Sargent's unique focus: identifying by the accumulation of single brushstrokes the minimal arrangement of signs necessary to produce a completely convincing reality. Most stupefying is Sargent's ability to overcome the technical difficulties imposed by this challenge across hundreds of surviving works. |
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The Sargent in Italy exhibition (which I saw in Denver in 2003) provided several excellent examples, among them The Moraine (right, top). All the published images are hideously skewed toward a false brownish light; I have tried to retrieve the correct balance of brilliant whites woven into shades and glowing tints of cerulean, ultramarine, umber, sienna and ochre. Seen from several feet away, the painting creates a lively, almost photographically literal image of a granite scree, with every rock particularized in astonishing detail and with a perfectly judged range of values from the skylit mountain pass in the background to the glaringly sunlit rock textures and sharply contrasted rock shadows in the foreground. But when seen from a distance of a few inches, the rocks astonishingly dissolve into partially overlapping and seemingly random brushstrokes laid over a puckered ground (right, bottom). This kind of loose, illusionistic brushwork has a long ancestry, as far back as Rubens or Titian. But Sargent stands apart from his predecessors in two crucial respects: his brushwork coheres perceptually into a strong (almost photographic) realism, and the brushwork is always locally analytical. With Monet's late waterlily paintings, for example, there is little difference between a square inch of canvas and the entire pond the lossy brushwork creates a lossy image. (Richard Taylor has demonstrated that this constant fractal complexity across different areas of a painting is a consistent feature of Jackson Pollock's paintings.) In contrast, Sargent creates a convincing image and wealth of detail from what seems on close inspection to be completely inadequate means: the two levels of view are fundamentally different. The connection between them is the perceptual act. Sargent is unrivalled in his ability to build convincing object perceptions from separate brush signs, and to create apparent details through the force of broad effects. With many Impressionist painters, as with Rubens or Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock or Joan Mitchell, there is a recognizable sense of groping: by daub, dribble or smear, one similar mark on top of the next, the painter finally approximates the desired overall effect. Other painters (Van Gogh, Seurat or Signac) take the opposite extreme and carve out their paintings with thousands of distinct, mechanically similar glyphs, whittling away at the bare canvas. Sargent never does either: every mark contributes a specific energy and perceptual connection. I imagine that The Moraine was constructed much as two master go players lay their stones, shaping the final pattern from an intently tactical choice of individual moves: the size of the brush, the charge and viscosity of the paint, the weight and speed of the stroke, and the unique shape of the touch. Light, form and surface texture are simultaneously captured in every stroke. Nowhere is there evidence that wrist or arm fell into a mechanical, random or "gestural" approximation, even briefly. All details are illusory, created by the relationships among much coarser, individualized signs. In my experience, no other painter has an equal skill both in oils and watercolors at conveying so much visual richness with such analytical means, creating light, color and form through the arrangement of visually sufficient yet superficial signs.
A great number of Sargent's watercolors were made in Venice, whose mixture of light, water and picturesque architecture held an endless fascination for him. In these he meditates on the fleeting, flowing, insubstantial nature of reality through his images of water, facades, and effects of changing light. In addition, Venice provided the image of a disappearing past to anchor Sargent's unique focus on the flow of time. The imminent destruction of Venice from subsiding land and encroaching sea had been predicted since the 1820's, and during the Victorian era Venice became a focus of preservationist efforts; but the Venetian aura of irreversible decay also symbolized for many Europeans the withering of traditional class and cultural distinctions that began with the revolutions of 1848. Against this backdrop of moldering stones and a vanishing past, Sargent looked for compositions that would convey a snapshot feel of immediacy and motion, as in the Santa Maria della Salute (1904, 46x58cm). Many of his watercolors were painted from a canal boat or a wharfside bench and dashed off with incredible speed and accuracy of brush. |
The Moraine (c.1908) by John Singer Sargent detail of the painting |
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During his training under Carolus-Duran, Sargent was taught the beauty of a subdued tonal palette (in the style of the Spanish painter Velàzquez), the correct adjustment and placement of values, and the directive to paint exactly what he saw. Sargent turned these dictums into a watercolor technique that produced poetry from the most trivial or happenstance subjects he despised picturesque "views" almost as much as tourist crowds. One of the most affecting aspects of Sargent's paintings is the way they often present an image glimpsed during physical movement a hike, a walk in a garden, a trip in a canal boat. The act of perception is highlighted by the transient content and viewpoint of these images. |
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Sargent's vagabond childhood instilled in him a lifelong love of travel, and despite the large girth he acquired in later years he was always an energetic walker and mountain hiker. He was characteristically a painter of summer daylight and clear air: Turner's twilight, snow, fog and storms do not figure in his works. The many paintings he completed during summer excursions through the Italian Alps show his companions reading, sleeping, or as in Simplon Pass: the Tease (1911, 40x52cm) in the conversational play that swirls among companions resting after a strenuous climb. The Simplon route between Geneva and northern Italy had been a picturesque commonplace for watercolorists since the early 19th century, but Sargent ignores the the grand mountain scenery to focus on his companions in the hike. Despite the apparently casual viewpoint of Sargent's watercolors, photographs and contemporary accounts show that he carefully selected the poses and settings for his paintings, and worked on them with intense concentration and rapid pace. The intimate and fleeting effect is the result of great craft, not inconvenient circumstances. Sargent's watercolors repay careful study for their remarkable brush technique, minimal palettes, beautiful color harmonies, perfectly judged tonal values, infallible sense of composition, and for his ability to capture the durable facts of the world in a way that highlights the poignant transience of perception and human existence. (I've posted on a separate page some contemporary accounts of Sargent's painting methods and teaching methods.)
In the past few decades, Sargent's watercolors have risen substantially in critical appreciation: they are no longer seen as mere doodlings, conservative and escapist, that the artist was content to give away. For painters, the essential volume is American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent (Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, 2000) by Stephanie Herdrich and H. Barbara Weinberg, which reproduces every painting and drawing in the Met's superlative collection, with an brief essay on Sargent's materials and technique by Marjorie Shelley. Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes by Warren Adelson & Richard Ormond (Abbeville Press, 1999) puts the watercolors in the context of Sargent's other works after 1900, when he cut back his work on society portraits to focus on paintings outdoors; unfortunately there are too many poorly focused, badly cropped or badly imbalanced color reproductions. Trevor Fairbrother's John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist (Yale University Press, 2000) is a mixed bag: a welcome and thoughtful reappraisal of Sargent's achievement and methods, it attributes Sargent's "sensuality" to his rumored homosexuality rather than to his brilliant and amazingly self directed talent. Carl Little's The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent (University of California Press, 1998) in paperback offers a generous sampling of all his watercolor themes, in good reproductions, with informative captions and text. Finally, the multivolume and lavishly illustrated catalog raisonné of Sargent's works has finally begun to cover his landscape and figure watercolors: see Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray (editors), John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes 1974-1882. Complete Paintings Volume IV. (Yale University Press, 2006). |
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