Comments on: John Singer Sargent

By: marge

marge — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 17:34:58 +0000

has anyone seen a Sargent portrait of a young man. no mustache, cotton white shirt, holding a pipe. I have a charcoal sketch of this signed JSSargent, 1907, but can find nothing about it, or who it is. Thought it might be the son of a subject, but have seen few young men.

By: vivien

vivien — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:25:50 +0000

great post!

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.

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:12:23 +0000

Wow, an amazing resource! Thanks, Katherine.

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!).

By: Katherine

Katherine — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:17:25 +0000

I’m kicking myself that I missed this when you posted 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

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:14:44 +0000

Thanks, Gerry.

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

By: Gerry Mooney

Gerry Mooney — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:19:18 +0000

I saw a PBS special last week on J.M.W. Turner and the times in which he painted, mid-1700’s to mid-1800’s, and they mentioned the hierarchy of subject matter that was promoted by the academies at the time.

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.

By: Li-An

Li-An — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:39:01 +0000

Thank you for the selection of books. I wanted to buy something about Sargent work and it will be a good beginning for me.

By: Seamus Berkeley

Seamus Berkeley — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:08:40 +0000

Nice posting Charley! Sargent was a master and one of the greatest painters in history.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 20:55:30 +0000

Very well said. It’s pleasant to hear someone who has a strong opinion and not so concerned about being politically correct. I am not a big fan of contemporary art – the only time I went to the contemporary art museum in Paris was to seek refuge from the rain one evening. My observation is many art schools are still favoring “white on white” vice teaching the technical expertise that makes academic art masters such as Sargent or Bouguereau the exceptional artists they are.

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.

By: Benjamin De Schrijver

Benjamin De Schrijver — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:49:06 +0000

I disagree about the lack of drama in his portraits. There certainly are portraits where he obviously didn’t care, but to me, he was a master of capturing the truth of the sitter. He painted many of his subjects as they were as much as possible, which reveals – at least in my opinion – a greater truth than paintings embellished to please the client, or paintings where the painter adds an ‘opinion’ of the sitter’s character to the painting. Because that exaggeration of a personality characteristic isn’t truth, it’s only the imagination of the painter, built on the little that he really knows about the subject. Rodin was similar with his sculptures: he let the models do their thing, and once they did something interesting, he went about it “like a mathematician, not a poet” (Rodin’s own words). The poetry of his sculptures comes from that same objectivity about the truth.

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.