Sargent and the Sea

about the artist

Adapted, in part, from Richard Ormond's Grove Art Online biography.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the most fashionable portrait painter working in Europe and the U.S. in the late 19th century. Raised by expatriate American parents, he studied in Paris with the portrait painter Carolus-Duran, soon distinguishing himself by his keenness of eye and facility of hand. Sargent spent his summers painting outdoor figure sketches and landscapes in a modernist and experimental vein. The studies made during these travels inspired a succession of exhibition pictures, including En Route pour la pêche.

Portraiture, however, became Sargent’s chosen sphere, and by 1900 he was the leading society portrait painter on both sides of the Atlantic, the “van Dyck of our times” as Auguste Rodin called him. The Corcoran’s portraits Madame Edouard Pailleron (1879) and Mrs. Henry White (1883) exemplify his incisive bravura style, enriched with Impressionist qualities of light and color. His dazzling portrayals presented his sitters in real spaces, capturing moments of arrested movement, and his ability to record what he saw with all the force of a first impression was matched to powers of large-scale composition and an intuitive feeling for character and status. His most famous work was a portrait of the celebrated beauty Mme Gautreau (1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which created a scandal when it was exhibited (as Madame X) at the Paris Salon of that year.

In 1890 Sargent began a mural cycle at the Boston Public Library which, along with a later one at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was to occupy a large part of his energies for the rest of his life; the Corcoran owns many pencil studies for the two mural cycles. After 1900 he spent his summers on long sketching holidays in the Alps, creating compositions such as the Corcoran’s Simplon Pass (1911).

IMAGE CREDIT: John Singer Sargent, Filet et Barque, c. 1879, watercolor and graphite on paper. Private Collection.

Exhibition Credit

Sargent and the Sea is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and made possible by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Christie's, The Mr. & Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc., and Altria Group, Inc. Additional support for the exhibition is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius and and The Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation.

altria NEA