Here I think he is respected. I certainly infinitely prefer him to the simpering of Bougereau :>)

I love the painterliness, the loose marks and yet the keen observation underlying them. His compositions are superb as well and imaginative.

Certainly better now than not at all. I’ve added an addendum to the post and put it on the list of links. A surprising number of people come on these posts after they’ve been published via search engines, so it will still be very useful (and I’ll certainly make use of it!).

I love JSS - he’s a virtuso with a brush and I absolutely agree with you that essentially he’s a landscape painter - for me what he enjoys is painting light and colour. I’ve always taken the view that he did the portraits to pay the bills and what he really loved doing can be seen in all the watercolour sketches and landscapes.

I think one of the points that is maybe underplayed in the commentary and comments is that Sargent is brilliant at composition and the arrangement of value shapes.

I did a study of him in 2007 and that and all the references I found at the time plus links to various books about him can be found in the site I created to archive all the links - John Singer Sargent - Resources for Artists

I don’t know why I respond so strongly to beautifully executed visible brush strokes, but the appeal is undeniable.

If I recall, it went something like, from top to bottom: historical painting, genre painting (scenes of daily life), portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. So portraits were literally of only middling importance, and I think these attitudes still pertained at the time Sargent was painting, and well into the 20th century. So in addition to taking hits for his “facility” he was working in a genre that was not respected. In a word, too commercial.

Still he knocks me out! The sign of a great painter is not hiding your brush strokes, but making the viewer believe that your brush strokes are actually the object! Looks easy, but hard to pull off.

That, and the nonchalant liveliness of his subjects brought about by his brush strokes, are what make him a great painter.

Also Benjamin De Schrijver’s comment above regarding “looking at a person…posing for a portrait” offers a unique idea of Sargent’s work which I had not considered before.

To me, when you look at most portraits, you feel you are looking at a portrait. With Sargent, you feel like you are looking at a person, in a room, posing for a portrait. Which is a world of difference. That’s the quality that immediatly appealed to me about his work… not his brushwork, even though that is masterful as well.

A normal portrait artist would paint a boy on a chair. Sargent paints a boy on a chair, absolutely bored, put there by his parents, not able to wait to get out of this whole thing.

I was also fortunate enough to catch the exhibition in Washington (I made a point of it); a stunning show which pretty much cemented my high regard of Sargent. I spent a lot of time walking up and back, up and back, marveling at how his astonishingly free and painterly wisps, whorls and glorious chunks of paint resolved into representational images at a distance.

The point I make about the emotion, or lack of it, in Sargent’s work; and its relevance in judging his stature as a painter, is that he is judged inappropriately on the basis of his subject matter.

Because he is, in his portrait paintings, painting figuratively, he is set next to figurative painters like Rembrandt and Carrivaggio, against which his subjects are indeed lacking in emotion or drama.

I say, however, that Sargent, even in his portrait work, is a landscape painter and should be judged against other landscape or still life painters. (This is why I suggest looking at his portraits as interior landscapes.)

We don’t expect Monet to show us the emotion in the “face” of a haystack, yet his paintings of haystacks are undeniably emotional. The emotion and drama are in the paint, the color, and the relationship between the artist and the visual world.

So it is, I think, with Sargent. In the image I’ve shown here, the focus, drama and visual excitement are not in the face of the sitter, but in her dress. Her face is only briefly (though superbly) indicated. The young woman, the presumed subject because it is a figurative painting, is only a part of the “landscape”, the overall visual dynamic, to which Sargent is responding with the poetry of his brush; a poetry that I believe puts him in the ranks of the greatest painters.