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John Singer Sargent Retrospective
| Article
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12290 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
2,303 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
The career of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) unfolds to our contemporary eyes with all the drama of a mystery novel. Here we have a young and gifted American artist who abandoned a potentially brilliant career at the Paris Salon, the acknowledged center of the nineteenth-century Western art world, and moved to London in 1884 to start anew. During the next several years his painting, which had been distinguished by its Renaissance Old Master quality, evolved into a new style of portraiture through a melding of several other art styles of the period. Subsequently, he was to become during the next forty years one of the most successful artists in Britain and the United States.
At first glance Sargent's enormous success might appear to have been due to an accommodation to upper-class British and American mentality. However, the John Singer Sargent retrospective of some 168 oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City offered a far more complex explanation which involved a growing conflict between nineteenth-century academic tradition and the emergence of twentieth-century modern art.
The retrospective, the first organized since the artist's death sixty years ago, begins with a stunning presentation of Sargent's earliest works. While still a student at the atelier of the French artist Carolus-Duran, Sargent at the precocious age of twenty was already creating masterpieces that members of the Academy might have envied. Despite his tender age, a portrait of his teacher had already been accepted by the Paris Salon of 1879 and awarded an Honorable Mention. Two years earlier the Frances Sherburne Ridley Watts portrait had also been accepted, and the following year a handsome outdoor scene, Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, had equally impressed the Salon Jury.
These early paintings and several other "student" works serve to whet one's appetite for the rest of the collection, which is displayed chronologically. Large as it is, the exhibition contains only a fraction of the more than 600 portraits and 2,500 other paintings that Sargent created, easily making him the most prolific of American artists.
The portraits of Edward Pailleron and Sargent's teacher, Carolus Duran, both painted in 1879, are an amazing accomplishment for an artist barely out of his teens. Instead of the slick, tight renderings that one might expect from this period of academic painting, Sargent brushed in his details with a broad stroke that not only was consistent with the best of Renaissance painting but reflected
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