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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 bequeat... |
Twentieth-century portraits |
By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist Max Beerbohm completed one of his seventeen caricatures of Sargent, making well known to the public the artist's paunchy physique. Although only in his forties, Sargent began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His An Interio... |
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." In that same year, Sargent painted his mode... |
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 (... |
By the time Sargent finished his portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity". Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emer... |
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 ... |
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. |
Watercolors |
Media related to Watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent at Wikimedia Commons |
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 pa... |
His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one reviewer noted: "Everything is given with the intensity of a dream." In the Middle East and North Africa Sargent painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fishermen. In ... |
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 pain... |
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. |
Other work |
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. |
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... |
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"... |
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. Sargent had been affected by the death of his niece Rose-Marie in the shell... |
Relationships and personal life |
Sargent was a life-long bachelor with a wide circle of friends, including Oscar Wilde (with whom he was neighbors for several years), gay author Violet Paget and his likely lover Albert de Belleroche. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent. However, recent scholarship has theorised he was a private, compl... |
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. One such Jewish client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice, Sargent "was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers". The p... |
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. As a young man, Sargent also for a time courted Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose. |
Sargent's friends and supporters included Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner, of both of whom he painted portraits, and Gardner also commissioned and purchased works from Sargent and sought his advice on other acquisitions. Edward VII and Paul César Helleu were also friends and supporters of Sargent. His associat... |
Critical assessment |
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 commissio... |
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", and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry". By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a reli... |
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 ... |
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 tha... |
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. |
After such a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's reputation has increased steadily since the 1950s. In the 1960s, a revival of Victorian art and new scholarship directed at Sargent strengthened his reputation. Sargent has been the subject of large-scale exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective ex... |
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." In a Time magazine article from the 1980s, critic Robert Hughes praised Sargent as "the unrivaled recorder of male power and... |
Later life |
In 1922, Sargent co-founded New York City's Grand Central Art Galleries together with Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others. Sargent actively participated in the Grand Central Art Galleries and their academy, the Grand Central School of Art, until his death in 1925. The Galleries held a major retrospective ... |
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. The Grand Central Art Galleries also organized a posthumous exhibition in 1928 of previously unseen sketches and drawings from throughout his car... |
Sales |
Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife was sold in 2004 for US$8.8 million 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. |
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. |
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. It was based on the Sargent and fashion exhibits at those two museums in 2023 and 2024. |
On July 13, 2024, the Des Moines Metro Opera premiered Damien Geter and Lila Palmer's "American Apollo," an opera about John Singer Sargent's supposed affair with Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962), one of his favorite models. |
Citations |
Works cited |
Adelson, Warren; Seldin Janis, Donna; Kilmurray, Elaine; Ormond, Richard; Oustinoff, Elizabeth, eds. (1997). Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-0-7892-0384-7. |
Charteris, Evan (1927). John Sargent: With Reproductions from His Paintings and Drawings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. |
Davis, Deborah (2003). Sargent's Women. Adelson Galleries. pp. 11–23. ISBN 0-9741621-0-8. |
Davis, Deborah (2003). Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madam X. Tarcher. ASIN: B015QKNWS0. |
Fairbrother, Trevor (2001). John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. Seattle Art Museum / Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08744-6. |
Fairbrother, Trevor (1994). John Singer Sargent. New York: Harry N. Abrams. p. 11. ISBN 0-8109-3833-2. |
Joselit, Jenna Weissman. "Restoring the American 'Sistine Chapel'". The Forward, August 13, 2010. |
Khandekar, Narayan; Pocobene, Gianfranco; Smith, Kate, eds. (2009). John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library: Creation and Restoration. Harvard Art Museums / Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300122909. |
Lehmann-Barclay, Lucie. "Public Art, Private Prejudice". Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2005, p. 11. |
Little, Carl (1998). The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21969-4. |
"New Painting at Boston Public Library Stirs Jews to Vigorous Protest". Boston Globe, November 9, 1919, p. 48. |
Noël, Benoît; Hournon, Jean. "Portrait de Madame X". Parisiana: La Capitale des arts au XIXème siècle. Paris: Les Presses Franciliennes, 2006. pp. 100–105. |
Olson, Stanley (1986). John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-44456-7. |
Ormond, Richard. "Sargent's Art". John Singer Sargent, pp. 25–7. Tate Gallery, 1998. |
Ormond, Richard; Kilmurray, Elaine (1998). Sargent: Complete Paintings. Vol. 1: The Early Portraits. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07245-7. |
Prettejohn, Elizabeth: Interpreting Sargent. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998, p. 9. |
Rewald, John: Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, p. 183. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. |
Further reading |
Adelson, Warren; Gerdts, William H.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli; Ormond, Richard; Oustinoff, Elizabeth (2006). Sargent's Venice. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11717-2. |
Avery, Kevin J. (2002). American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1835. Yale University Press. ISBN 1588390608. |
Capó, Julio Jr. (2017). Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-4696-3520-0. |
Cash, Sarah; Heller, Nancy G.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Ormond, Richard; Barón, Javier; Sharpe, Chloe; Southwick, Catherine (2022). Sargent and Spain. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art with Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300266467. |
Corsano, Karen; Williman, Daniel (2014). John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss. Rowman & Litchfield. ISBN 978-1-4422-3050-7. |
Cox, Devon (2015). The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde & Sargent in Tite Street. London: Frances Lincoln. ISBN 9780711236738. |
Esten, John. John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes. New York: Universe Pub., 1999. |
Fisher, Paul (2022). The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 9780374165970. |
Gallati, Barbara Dayer (2015). "John Singer Sargent's International Network of Artists and Muses", in John Singer Sargent: Painting Friends. London: National Portrait Gallery. ISBN 978 1 85514 550 4. |
Herdrich, Stephanie L.; Weinberg, H. Barbara (2000). American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press. ISBN 0-87099-952-4. |
Mount, Charles Merrill (1955). John Singer Sargent. New York: W. W. Norton. |
Ratcliff, Carter (1982). John Singer Sargent. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-673-7. |
Ratcliff, Carter (2023). John Singer Sargent (Masterpiece ed.). New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-07892-1440-9. |
Rubin, Stephen D. (1991). John Singer Sargent's Alpine Sketchbooks: A Young Artist's Perspective. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-19378-7. |
Thomas, John (2017). Redemption Achieved: John Singer Sargent's Crucifixion of Christ with Adam and Eve and Its Place in His Work. Wolverhampton: Twin Books. ISBN 978-0-9934781-1-6. |
External links |
113 artworks by or after John Singer Sargent at the Art UK site |
Biography, Style and Artworks |
John Singer Sargent – gallery of 809 paintings |
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