Sargent Portrait Drawings

42 Works

John Singer Sargent

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486245249
• eBook ISBN: 9780486133973
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Portraiture is a demanding art requiring the artist to capture a likeness and render it revealing some hint of the personality behind the image. A two-pronged task, it requires great technical skill and an intuitive eye. In both these respects, John Singer Sargent stands out as a portrait artist of major stature.
Born in 1856 in Florence of American parents, Sargent showed artistic aptitude at an early age and was enrolled at the Academia delle Belle Arti in that city. Later he studied with Parisian artist Carolus Duran, acquiring the loose, painterly style for which he is renowned. International acclaim as a portrait artist came early in his life and followed him throughout his career.
Sargent's portraits done in oil are well known; they appear in major museums throughout the world. A lesser-known but no less respected aspect of his oeuvre, his portrait drawings are the focus of this collection. Included here are early works in pencil and pastels, and later renderings in charcoal, a medium Sargent favored after 1910. They have been selected from both public and private collections by art historian Trevor J. Fairbrother and attest to Sargent's technical skill, versatility, and dexterity in three different mediums.
In addition, these works reveal Sargent's ability to treat a diverse group of subjects; he handles the languorous beauties of the Edwardian age, members of the aristocracy, and the great literary and artistic figures of his day with equal virtuosity, capturing their characteristic mood and style. This collection includes portraits of Lord and Lady Spencer, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, Vaslav Nijimsky, Tamara Karsavina, Dame Ethel Smyth, and Jascha Heifetz.
Artists, students, historians, and lovers of portraiture will appreciate this selection of drawings by Sargent. Anyone interested in trying his hand at portraiture will find this volume both instructional and inspirational.

Introduction

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was born in Florence of wealthy American parents who had moved to Europe from Philadelphia in 1854. While the family traveled between cultural centers and spas his talent for drawing was encouraged by his mother, an amateur sketcher, and by artist friends of his parents. At 14 he began to attend drawing classes at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence; and his professional training as a painter began in 1874 when he was admitted into the atelier of the Parisian artist Carolus-Duran. Here he learned the loose, painterly style associated with the new interest in the seventeenth-century bravura artists Velasquez and Hals. Vivid brushwork and an intuitive eye for his subjects’ characteristic gestures brought Sargent rapid international acclaim as a leader in modern portraiture. By 1890 he had settled in London, having already worked in Paris, New York and Boston, commanding high prices from fashionable sitters. That year he accepted a commission to decorate a hall in the new Boston Public Library, and for the rest of his career worked on this and major mural projects at Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At the turn of the century he began to make many informal pictures during travels in Italy, Spain, the Alps, the Near East and North America. It is often suggested that these brilliantly spontaneous watercolors and paintings signal his having tired of professional portraiture. In fact he never stopped making portraits; instead of time-consuming oil paintings he came to prefer charcoal drawings that could be produced in a single sitting about two hours in length. From 1910 to his death in 1925 he made over 500 such drawings, while painting fewer than 30 oil portraits.

This selection of portrait drawings begins with Sargent’s arrival in Paris. Plate 1 shows an 1874 sketch of a fellow student at Carolus-Duran’s atelier, the American J. Carroll Beckwith. Concern for a strong facial likeness is evident, but already a rapid and suggestive execution can be seen in the clothes and accessories. The 1880 drawing of another American artist and friend, Gordon Greenough (Plate 2), shows Sargent’s developing technical abilities when compared with the sketch of Beckwith. The climax of his Parisian career was the Salon debut of Mme. Pierre Gautreau, now known as ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Technical Note and Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction