John Singer Sargent

American painter

• Born: January 12, 1856
• Birthplace: Florence, Italy
• Died: April 15, 1925
• Place of death: London, England

Sargent was one of the greatest American painters of his time, but most of his influences and training were European. He was particularly renowned for his magnificent portraiture, which earned for him a reputation as a modern Anthony Van Dyck.

Early Life

John Singer Sargent was the son of Mary Newbold Singer Sargent, an incurable romantic. In 1854, she induced her husband, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, to abandon his medical practice and their comfortable, predictable bourgeois existence and move to Europe. Mary had recently come into a decent inheritance from her father, a wealthy fur merchant, and now saw no reason to live out her life among the dull, middle-class surroundings of Philadelphia. The transplanted Sargents usually spent their summers in northern France, Germany, or England, and headed to southern France or Italy during the winter, living in rented apartments. Florence, Italy, could be characterized as the family’s “home base.” There, the Sargents’ eldest child, John, was born and attended school.

John Singer Sargent displayed a high degree of intellectual maturity, but his formal education was frequently interrupted by the family’s travels. In addition to English, he spoke Italian, German, and French fluently; he became an accomplished pianist; he knew European literature, history, and art. His mother constantly hauled him around to museums and cathedrals; she was an enthusiastic watercolorist and encouraged him to make art his career, much to the dismay of her husband, who wanted his son to become a sailor. It was Mary Sargent who had her way, and John was allowed to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. The young student enthusiastically filled sketchbooks with drawings of classical monuments, copies of old master paintings, and still lifes; he drew people and scenes that he observed on his various travels. His parents showed his work to professional artists, and, when these experts confirmed John’s talent, it was decided that he should be sent to Paris to further his studies.

Sargent arrived in the French capital in late spring of 1874 and was accepted by Charles Jurand Carolus-Duran, a famous academic portraitist, to join his atelier for advanced students; Sargent also passed the examinations for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. He thus received one of the best formal art educations of his day. The Beaux Arts gave him a solid grounding in academism; Carolus-Duran taught him to paint in half-tones and trained him to eliminate all that was not essential from his composition.

Sargent was also influenced by such artists as Édouard Manet and Eugène Boudin and some of the Impressionists; like them, he spent his summers in the French provinces painting outdoors. His progress was rapid. One of his paintings, En route pour la pêche (also known as The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale), which resulted from a summer in Brittany, won a second-class medal at the Salon of 1878, a great personal achievement for a young unknown artist. Carolus-Duran thought so highly of his pupil that he invited him to help paint the Triumph of Marie de’ Medici, a large mural commissioned for the ceiling of the Luxembourg Palace.

Sargent helped color the design of the mural but was also allowed to paint the two allegorical figures on either side of the principal portrait of Marie de’ Medici; he also painted a bystander with the features of Carolus-Duran, who was so pleased that he allowed his pupil to paint a more formal portrait of him. The work, a remarkably perceptive representation done in half-tones and selective highlights, was artistically the culmination of the lessons Sargent had been taught. The portrait, both chronologically and artistically, marked the beginning of his professional career.

Life’s Work

Sargent established his own studio (first on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, later on the rue Berthier) and began to enjoy life as a rising young society artist. It was extremely difficult for a foreigner to break into the French market, however, and most of his commissions at that time came from wealthy foreigners living or visiting abroad. He did do an uncommissioned full-length portrait, Madame Gautreau (1884), which he hoped would open some doors, but the work was badly received at the Salon of 1884. Nevertheless, Sargent hardly suffered from lack of praise. According to Henry James, he was so talented that even on the threshold of his career he had nothing more to learn.

During this period, Sargent also did some subject paintings, such as the exotic El Jaleo (1882), a picture of a Gypsy dancer he saw while on a visit to Spain. For the most part, however, he did not stray far from his main source of income, although he became increasingly disenchanted with working in the French capital. His commissions had begun to decline, and he had not received the proper respect he thought he deserved. From time to time, his work had taken him to England as the wealthy British had less hesitation about having their portraits painted by foreigners than did the French.

Sargent passed the summer of 1885 at Broadway in the Cotswolds, where he did a number of landscapes. At that time, he apparently decided to make his residence in the British Isles more permanent; the following year, he closed down his Paris studio and moved to London, renting a studio previously occupied by James McNeill Whistler. The British capital would be his home for the rest of his life.

Commissions for portraits came slowly at first—some potential patrons, accustomed to the formalism of the Royal Academy, found his technique a bit too avant-garde—but gradually, he was commissioned for more and more work, until he had almost more than he could handle. Although the English art scene was not as exciting as the one he had left in Paris, Sargent’s personal associations in the British capital were more congenial and fulfilling. Many of his clients were wealthy Americans, and one of these, Henry Marquand, invited him, in 1887, to come to the United States (to Newport, Rhode Island) to paint a portrait of his wife with the prospect of other commissions from Marquand’s well-heeled friends.

Sargent’s trip to the United States lasted eight months. He completed twelve formal portraits and had a one-man show in Boston in January, 1888, which received rave reviews. Everywhere he went, he was treated as a great artist and was appreciated in a way it seemed he had never been in Europe. However, he returned to England; during the summer of 1888, he painted a series of pictures in the Impressionist style of Claude Monet, for whom he had an intense admiration. After this interlude, he returned to full-time portraiture.

One of Sargent’s most famous portraits, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889), he solicited himself. He returned to the United States in December, 1889, for another series of portraits, but he was also commissioned to decorate the upper landing of the Boston Public Library, a project that would occupy him intermittently for the next quarter of a century. As his theme, Sargent chose the development of religious thought from its pagan origin, through Old Testament times, to Christianity. The actual painting was done in England on canvas and transported to Boston. Although Sargent considered the work to be one of his major contributions to contemporary art, the murals did not display his talent at its best.

Throughout the last years of the Victorian period and the following Edwardian period, Sargent was widely regarded as the greatest portrait painter in England, his status confirmed by the number of commissions he was now receiving from the British aristocracy and by his election to full membership in the Royal Academy in 1897. However, the more famous he became and the greater the requests for his services, the more his interest in portraiture declined. He undoubtedly recognized that his work was suffering from repetition and a tendency toward formalism and artificiality. Consequently, from 1910 onward, he devoted the major part of his time to landscapes, journeying to Spain, the Holy Land, Egypt, Majorca, Corfu, and, especially, the Alpine region and Italy for subject matter. He chose the subjects that pleased him, beginning his work early in the day, having plopped his easel down wherever the spirit moved him. Sargent continued to work in oils, but most of his production was now in watercolors.

Sargent was in the Austrian Tirol when World War I broke out. The local military authorities refused him permission to leave the country, and he remained in the village of Colfushg and continued to paint. He apparently took little interest in the course of hostilities, which he regarded as collective madness; he naïvely believed that fighting was suspended on Sundays. Finally, he managed to leave Austria and make it to Italy, through France, and back to England, where he resumed work on the mural for the Boston library.

Sargent came again to the United States in 1916, and, on this trip, accepted another commission for a mural: for the rotunda of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. When he returned to England in April, 1918, he was asked by the Ministry of Information’s War Artists Committee to do a painting emphasizing wartime Anglo-American cooperation. He went to France to do research, staying there six months until October, one month before the armistice. The result was Gassed , painted in his London studio, which shows a line of Allied soldiers, eyes bandaged, being led one after the other toward a dressing station. The picture was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1919 and became an instant sensation, being judged one of the best paintings to come out that year.

Sargent now came more frequently to the United States, his work on his wall decorations monopolizing much of his time and energy. He was there from 1919 to 1920; he returned again in 1921 and in 1923, and he was planning to make a return trip to oversee the installation of his museum paintings. Just before he was scheduled to leave, on April 15, 1925, Sargent died of a heart attack, following a farewell party given by his sister. He was found with an open copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764) beside him. His death drew national attention, marked by a memorial service in London’s St. Paul’s cathedral.

Significance

Like a great actor who devotes too much of his talent to soap operas instead of to the classics, Sargent for most of his productive life painted works lacking in spiritual depth and imaginative force, works that he was later to regret having done. “I hate to paint portraits! I hope I never paint another portrait in my life.… I want now to experiment in more imaginary fields,” he said.

However, portraits were what Sargent did best. When he was good, he was excellent; when he was bad, he was still extraordinary. For example, his portrait Woodrow Wilson (1917), not generally considered to be one of his best, is remarkable in the way it captures the humorless, messianic Wilsonian stare. Sargent’s misfortune was to live at a time when painting the famous and haut-monde was increasingly looked on with derision.

Although Sargent refused to accept any commissions in which he did not have complete artistic freedom, he remained acutely sensitive to the social and professional stature of his subjects, whom he frequently placed in his paintings in theatrical or symbolic surroundings. Sargent was a businessperson who gave his sitters what they paid for. He posed them on Louis XV settees, in front of marble pillars, standing beside huge cloisonné vases, some wearing top hats and highly polished riding boots, as in Lord Ribblesdale (1902), or plumed bonnets, as in Lady Sassoon (1907), or adorned, as in The Wyndham Sisters (1899), in dresses worth small fortunes. Sargent was clearly an artist of fin de siècle conspicuous consumers, and he served them well.

Americans claimed Sargent as one of their own, but in training and performance he was completely European. Sargent based his style on Europe’s traditional artistic values as expressed by the artists he admired. He never tired of going to museums to learn from the great artists of the past, such as Diego Velázquez, Titian, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubens, and, above all, Frans Hals, whose loose brushwork became Sargent’s own trademark.

Sargent’s painterly style was enlivened with splashes of clear color that attested the lessons he had learned from the Impressionists. He was never able to adapt his palette completely to theirs, however, and sometimes he became too garish or somber. “One day the American painter Sargent came here to paint with me,” Monet recalled. “I gave him my colors and he wanted black, and I told him: ’But I haven’t any.’ ’Then I can’t paint,’ he cried and added, ’How do you do it!’”

Sargent came the closest to Impressionism in his watercolors, especially those he did in Venice, which also reveal him at his spontaneous and individualistic best. However, if Sargent had failings as a painter, they were failings of theme, not of expertise, for his was overpowering and could rival that of the finest painters of any age.

Bibliography

Charteris, Evan Edward. John Sargent. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927. This official biography is built largely from quotations, letters, and anecdotes. The author, who was a personal friend of Sargent, was too close to his subject to be truly objective, and the painter’s personality remains elusive. Sargent is revealed as tremendously dedicated, hardworking, and self-critical, but such traits alone are hardly the stuff of drama.

Davis, Deborah. Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X. New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Penguin Group, 2003. The story of Madame X, Sargent’s painting of a woman in a black evening gown. Describes how Sargent won the commission for the painting, the work’s reception, and how the painting changed the life of Sargent and its subject, Virginie Gautreau.

Lubin, David M. Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Contains extensive sexual-sociological analysis of Sargent’s famous portrait of the Boit children, The Daughters of Edward Boit (1882). Essentially an exercise in speculation and provocation, showing that what is not known about a painting need not stand in the way of intellectualizing about its meaning.

McSpadden, J. Walker. Famous Painters of America. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1916. A brief description of Sargent’s life and work, written during his lifetime in obvious recognition and appreciation of his genius. Argues that despite his thoroughly European training and formation, “Americans may rightfully claim Sargent.”

Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the Late John Singer Sargent. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1925. A catalog of some of Sargent’s most famous works, commemorating the unveiling of his mural decorations in the Boston Public Library. The works on display came almost exclusively from American collections, helping to reinforce the artist’s image as a native son.

Mount, Charles Merril. John Singer Sargent. New York: W. W. Norton, 1955. A complete, well-researched, and lavishly documented account in which even the most insignificant aspects of Sargent’s life seem worthy of inclusion. Mount, who is also a portraitist, offers intelligent and perceptive commentary about his subject’s style and techniques.

Olson, Stanley. John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. A literate, sympathetic, but objective biography, particularly strong in its portrayal of the varied figures who played a part in Sargent’s life. Includes a small selection of illustrations.

Ormond, Richard, and Elaine Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings. 3 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1998-2003. A definitive catalogue raissonné of Singer’s works in oil, watercolor, and pastel, with many of the paintings reproduced in color. The paintings are arranged chronologically, with documentation about each painting’s subject, the circumstances of its creation, its artistic techniques, and its place within Singer’s total body of work. The first volume, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits, covers the artist’s years in France and England through his first professional trip to the United States in 1887; volume two, John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the 1890’s, focuses on his work between 1889 and 1900; the final volume, John Singer Sargent: The Later Portraits, presents his work from 1900 through 1925.