John Singer Sargent, long dismissed by the art establishment as a facile painter of society portraits, has finally in recent years been getting something of his due as a painter.

Beyond the technical mastery and delicious painterly flourish of his formal work in oil, Sargent was one of the great masters of the medium of watercolor; and it was in his watercolors, often painted while vacationing or traveling, that he found his greatest joy as an artist.

The Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have put together an exhibition that draws on the Sargent watercolors in the collection of both museums.

Titled simply John Singer Sargent Watercolors, it consists of ninety-three works in watercolor with mixtures of opaque watercolor, bodycolor, graphite and whatever else Sargent could find to achieve his goals. To these they have added nine of Sargent’s oils — just in case the watercolors aren’t enough to leave you completely dazzled.

I consider this a must-see show if I can possibly make it, and hope to give you a subsequent first-hand report.

In the meanwhile, there is a catalog from the exhibition, John Singer Sargent Watercolors, that James Gurney reviews here.

I can also recommend an older book, The Watercolors of John Singer Singer Sargent by Carl Little, but judging from Gurney’s review, I would go for the new catalog first.

The exhibition will be at the Brooklyn Museum until July 28, 2013. (Incidentally, the Brooklyn Museum, as I write here, is a terrific museum in general, often unfairly overshadowed by its more famous counterparts in Manhattan.)

The exhibition then moves to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it will be on display from October 13, 2013 to January 20, 2014. The last stop will be at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for which dates have not yet been set.

There is a small slideshow on the Brooklyn Museum page for the exhibit, but with a bit of clicking you can search their collections for John Singer Sargent Watercolors and access more works. Use the blue arrow at right of the top section of thumbnails to access more objects (their search interface needs work). On the page for an individual work, click on “Download” and choose a large size for larger images.

The MFA has an easier to navigate search; click on “Zoom” for larger images.

[Via Gurney Journey]

Andrew Borg is a artist based in Malta, where he portrays that island nation’s Mediterranean sunlight in bright plein air watercolors.

You can see in his approach his admiration for watercolor masters like John Singer Sargent.

On Borg’s website you will find his portrayals of Malta’s dramatic rocky landscapes, formal gardens, sunlit streets, churches, and coastlines. You will also find some interpretive works and portrayals of other places in the Mediterranean and Europe.

In addition there are sections of drawings in charcoal from life and traditional casts.

There is an additional portfolio of his work in Artmajeur, where the originals are for sale.

Yan Nascimbene’s beautiful, elegant and deceptively simple illustrations and watercolors capture nuances of light and color that give you an immediate feeling of place and time, and often evoke an emotional connection to events or places in your own life.

Nascimbene died last Thursday, January 31, 2013, at the age of 63.

For more, see my previous post on Yan Nascimbene.

[Via Irene Gallo @IreneGallo]

William Trost Richards, one of America’s foremost landscape and marine painters (and father of American Impressionist Anna Richards Brewster), had a patron named George Whitney, who lived near him in Philadelphia and supported him not only by purchasing his works on a regular basis, but by helping to finance Richards’ travels.

While traveling and painting, Richards would send back to Whitney small watercolors, most roughly 3 x 5 inches (7.6 x 12.7cm), which he called “coupons”, partly as a thank you and partly as examples of compositions from which Whitney would choose selections for Richards to later develop into larger oils.

Most of Whitney’s collection of Richard’s work was split up after his death, but the majority of the “coupon” watercolors were kept together and were recently donated to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

The collection is on display there in a special exhibition curated in collaboration with the Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island titled A Mine of Beauty: Landscapes by William Trost Richards. The exhibition runs until this Sunday, December 30, 2012.

The small watercolors are accompanied by larger watercolors and oils both from the Academy’s permanent collection and loans from other Philadelphia collections.

Though there is no special gallery for the exhibition on the Academy’s website, a search of their collection online will include all of the “coupon” watercolors as well as larger watercolors and oils.

The beautiful small watercolors, I’m happy to say, are actually shown in images that are a bit lager than life size.

Hare (or Field Rabbit), by Albrecht Durer.

Watercolor and bodycolor. Stunning mastery of water media, and one of the most clear, focused and beautiful examples of artistic observation I’ve ever seen.

Wow.

On Google Art Project. Click on the image for zoom controls.

Original is in the Albertina, Vienna.

Irena Roman paints bright, crisp, transparent watercolors, both as illustrations and for gallery display.

She particularly excels at the challenge of portraying the play of light across, through and around transparent or translucent objects and their often complex shadows.

You can find a selection of her work on The iSpot, though the images a bit small to appreciate her nuanced handling of the medium.

Her blog has several larger images linked to some of the images in the posts. There is also a short bio on iSpot.

Roman’s work has been featured in publications like Splash: The Best of American Watercolor, Print and Communication Arts, and on the cover of Watercolor Magic magazine.

The image above, top, was just accepted into the 2012 American Watercolor Society’s Annual International Exhibition and she has been awarded Signature Membership status.

Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.

A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.

Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.

Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.

Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.

The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.

On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.

This gets my Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy.

Kiah Kiean is an architect, designer and artist. He has a loose, gestural sketching style with which he renders scenes of his native Penang, Malaysia, as well as townscapes and cityscapes from his travels.

Kiean works in ink, wash, graphite and watercolor. He posts images of his sketches on his artblog and Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers website, which is where I encountered his work.

Occasionally he posts photos of his sketchbooks, which show that he often works at a size a bit larger than many artists who do location sketches. At times he works on large drawing paper and at other times on large Moleskine sketchbooks open two pages wide.

Since much of his work is in a large or distinctly horizontal format, the small images above don’t show it to best advantage, as the detail crops at top, second and fifth down, demonstrate.