Watercolour is too often dismissed as the medium of drearily literal topographers, eager amateur dabblers and the sedate denizens of polite drawing rooms. Yet look at the works of John Singer Sargent and you will understand why all such clichés should be ditched. The artist’s watercolours, going on show soon at Dulwich Picture Gallery, south London, are hardly what he is known for. However, at their best they seem to possess an off-the-cuff freshness. They have a brightness, a freedom, an unpremeditated fluency. The viewer stands as if by the side of the painter, having stumbled across him in his private creative world.
Wielding a great fistful of brushes, Sargent would approach a new watercolour with what has been described as “a kind of genial fury, emitting grunts and groans and windy sizzling sounds from between his lips”. “Great washes of colour would go on paper with huge brushes or sponges,” recalled one of his cousins. And cries of “Demons! Demons!” or “The devil’s own!” would burst at intervals from his lips.
Sargent appears to have approached works in this medium rather more passionately than his more famous oil portraits. He is recognised the world over as the painter of elegant aristocrats and suave socialites. Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, for instance, who gazes out of her canvas at the Scottish National Gallery with a startling self-possession, or the American expatriate sitter for his notorious Portrait of Madame X, in which a stray shoulder strap caused an uproar at the 1884 Paris Salon. Yet in 1907, much to the horror of his upper-class clientele (the scandal didn’t do him too much damage), he abandoned the genre. He had just turned 50 and had come to the crux of his career.
Born in 1856 to American parents, Sargent was brought up as an expatriate roaming Europe’s towns, spas and mountain resorts. He trained as a painter in Paris before (encouraged by his friend the novelist Henry James) finally deciding in 1886 to live and work in London. In the space of a decade his reputation soared. An artist at first greeted suspiciously as a French-trained radical was soon renowned on both sides of the Atlantic as the premier portraitist of the Edwardian era. He was a pillar of the British establishment. He was financially comfortable. His path seemed set, but then came a turning point.
Sargent was comfortably off and facing the second half of his life without too many worries. Yet he was bored with commissions. He wanted the freedom to paint what he wanted, to find a way to re-energise his art. So he picked up the little tin of watercolours from his boyhood and let the skill that had first found its expression through this eminently portable medium gradually re-establish its grip.
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“I think he has a magical talent,” says Richard Ormond, who, as well as being co-curator of the Dulwich exhibition, is a great-nephew of the artist (his grandmother, Violet, was Sargent’s youngest sister). “But his watercolours have been very underplayed. They tend to be dropped into larger shows of what are commonly thought of as his far more significant portraits and landscapes.” They have not been accorded the same sort of critical respect given to the watercolours of, for instance, Winslow Homer, who has been hailed as America’s greatest master of the medium.
Sargent’s attitude didn’t help. He wouldn’t sell them, believing that they “would only amount to anything when taken as a lot together”. When eventually he was persuaded to part with some, it was en bloc to museums, first in Brooklyn and then in his native Boston. Although there are smaller ones at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, these two institutions are the principle repositories of his watercolour works.
Four years ago, pooling their resources, the museums in Boston and Brooklyn put on a dazzling show in America of what have become Sargent’s most famous watercolours. Yet the forthcoming Dulwich exhibition, Sargent: The Watercolours — the first dedicated show to be staged in this country since 1927 — draws only on British collections. Bringing together about 80 works that range in subject from architectural fragments through family portraits to alligators slipping through Florida’s swamps, the show will present images that have seldom, if ever, been shown before.
“He has a magical talent, but his watercolours have been underplayed
Sargent started his painting life as a watercolourist. His mother was an accomplished amateur who, convinced that hauling her children around the museums and churches of Europe was sufficient education, encouraged them to share in her artistic enthusiasms. “He sketches quite nicely & has a remarkably quick & correct eye,” she noted of her 11-year-old son. “If we could afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be quite a little artist.”
As an emerging painter, however, Sargent put watercolour to one side. Although a number of early sketches, dating from the late 1870s to the mid-1880s, will go on display in the Dulwich show, he treated such efforts as subsidiary. These include, for instance, a sailing ship docked at a quayside, a quick wash of colour over a pencil sketch; Violet posing in a portrait inspired by Velázquez, awkwardly shy in her floaty summer dress; and the dark smudge of a woman lying in a gondola.
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From the late 1880s through the 1890s Sargent was more interested in building up his oil portraiture. This, and a mural project for Boston Public Library, occupied most of his time. Although he stayed interested in watercolour, promoting friends who worked in the medium and completing a few sketches on his travels to America, Spain, Tangiers or Scotland, it was not until 1900 that he again took up that fistful of sables in earnest.
He painted many more watercolours when — accompanied by his sisters and assorted friends — he began to travel every summer. What more practical medium, after all, for an artist on the move? His easel with its adjustable legs could be set up on alpine slopes. He could crouch, with his box of colours, on rocky promontories or beside a rushing stream, in architectural crannies or a swaying gondola.
These works speak of relaxed pleasure far from the demands of grand sitters and the responsibilities of a studio. Whether creating snapshot-style images of companions (who are often also at work painting), or the exotic native costumes or customs of local people, a minareted Middle Eastern skyline or a team of labouring oxen, he captures, primarily, his sensory impressions of the scene. Watercolour is so spontaneous a medium; Sargent dashes it down, capturing a fleeting mood.
“I have an entirely different feeling for sketches and studies than I have for portraits which are my ‘gagne-pain’ [livelihood] + which I am delighted to get rid of,” he wrote. “Sketches from nature give me pleasure to do + pleasure to keep.” The walls of his London studio were papered with his efforts.
Yet Sargent’s watercolours amount to more than just atmospheric records of his travels. They presented a new challenge at a time when he was feeling stale. Sargent described the process of painting them as “making the best of an emergency”. “He set himself the most terrifying problems and gave rein to an amazing virtuosity and dazzling technique,” wrote his biographer Martin Birnbaum.
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The subject matter may, to the contemporary viewer, feel conventional enough. Yet look again and you will discover a painter adopting the most idiosyncratic viewpoints or progressive techniques. He might work wet-on-wet, blurring outlines and colours, creating an aura of almost ethereal translucency, or use a dry brush, clotting lumps of bright colour. He scrapes, sponges and scumbles; he squeezes straight from the tube.
Working en plein air, like the impressionists he so much admired (Sargent played a pioneering role in introducing the style of Monet, Renoir and Pissaro to Britain), he works (also like the impressionists) to crop and condense the scenes that he paints. He concentrates on fragments, for instance, focusing on the base of a fountain in Bologna or the statue of Fortune on top of the Venice custom house. He peers upwards and sketches some high cranny of a church or creeps in under the belly of a half-built boat.
His wilfully flattened and often asymMetrical compositions reflect the Japanese prints that so influenced the impressionists. Like these painters, says Ormond, he is trying to depict reality by capturing the way in which people see. “The fragment becomes a metaphor for modern life in that it resists the idea that art can represent a complete object, scene or experience. It concedes, implicitly and philosophically, that art is provisional.”
“These works speak of relaxed pleasure far from the demands of grand sitters
A catalogue essay notes Sargent’s fascination with the developments of photography. He would buy photos wherever he travelled. He had a collection of more than 600 and several were probably — although supporting evidence is sparse — ones he had taken himself. In his paintings he, like the camera, captures sitters in mid-movement. Backgrounds are blurred as if in a snapshot. One of the images presents an (almost unique in his oeuvre) elongated panorama of Constantinople, its pinnacled skyline emerging from the morning haze. It echoes, the catalogue suggests, the views offered by the recently developed wide-angle lens.
The British watercolour tradition was revivified by Sargent’s work. He was “like an eagle in the dovecot” one fellow artist declared. “The vehement vitality and swift assurance of his sketches reduce[d] the work of their neighbours on the wall to paper in a curious way.”
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There is a story, says Ormond, that his family often tell. The two children of James Deering, the architect of Vizcaya (a fantasy Italian villa near Miami), one day, on a visit, went out alone to the woods. There they discovered a “wonderful tramp”. He had old clothes and a beard. Rather than chasing them away, he encouraged them to play and scamper. He let them climb on to his lap. When they got home they told the adults about him. The response was much laughter. “That tramp is John Singer Sargent,” the children were told. This is precisely the sort of unexpected and spontaneous perspective that the Dulwich Picture Gallery show will offer.
Sargent: The Watercolours is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 (020 8693 5254), from June 21 to October 8
