John Singer Sargent

What does it mean to see the world like a master painter? We often hear the idea that an image is worth one thousand words, but what does it take for an image to actually accomplish this? John Singer Sargent shook the world with his masterful storytelling in his painting. He did not fit in with any movement of his time because his technique was a movement unto itself. In this lesson, we explore his most famous works and how they changed the way that we see the world. One of the Art Club members, an erudite little girl, mentioned during the lesson that, “He was a very magical person, and saw the world in a magical way and we can see that through his paintings”. This is the best description of John Singer Sargent’s work: magical.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy in 1856. His parents were American expatriates who moved from New England to Italy because of the beautiful weather. Sargent was homeschooled by his parents and became an incredibly intelligent and well rounded young man. He was fluent in Italian, French, German and also an accomplished pianist. He studied geography, arithmetic and literature under the tutelage of his parents. 

In 1874, he entered the atelier of Carolus Durand, a leading portrait artist in Paris. Durand encouraged his students to paint immediately rather than make too many preliminary drawings to capture the energy and spirit of the moment in the final work. Sargent quickly became his protegé.

Carolus Durant’s most important advice to Sargent was this: “En art, tout ce qui n’est pas indispensable, est nuisible”. Sargent made this painting of Durand in 1879. This means that everything which is not absolutely necessary to the painting must be discarded. In a good poem, removing even one word destroys the whole thing. In a good story, removing even one detail causes the whole piece to become imbalanced. Similarly, in a masterful painting, every single brushstroke is crucial to the structure of the whole piece. You will see in Sargent’s paintings how faithfully he executed this lesson.

The Wyndham Sisters

The first story we will discuss is the painting of the Wyndham Sisters. In this painting, there are three very wealthy, aristocratic women reposing on a couch, adorned in glittering golden gowns. The youngest sister looks out from the canvas at the viewer in a confident pose that is mirrored above her, by an obscured portrait of a woman in a golden frame who may be their mother. 

The centre of this painting, you’ll notice, is darkness; there is nothing there. This was a radical choice because among classical painters, the most important object should be in the centre of the painting. In this case the main subjects rise from the bottom of the painting like a wave in the painting. The body language of the sisters reveals their personality. The one in the centre is clearly the most common one whereas the eldest on the right is more reserved and phlegmatic.  

The eye is always most attracted to that which has the most contrast because contrast contains the most information. To the eye, contrast is where new objects begin and existing ones end. They are the counters that articulate the world. As such, the eye travels most readily to the glint of brilliant gold sunshine on the picture frame above the youngest sister. The woman in the frame is obscured except for her pose which mimics the daughter she most likely resembles. She is the highest in status of the women and yet the most obscured, adding mystery and intrigue to the family relationship dynamics.

Many portrait painters are excellent at rendering the physical details of the face, but few can capture the relationships and idiosyncratic personalities of each family member. We know so much about the Wyndham sisters and their family without reading a single word about them. This is the mastery of Sargent. 

Lady Agnew’s Magnetic Eyes

When you look at Lady Agnew’s portrait, John Singer Sargent seems to have painted a gravity into her beautiful eyes. She is reposed in a simple lilac dress in a chair, but wherever you look in the painting, the eyes are ineluctably pulled back to her dark eyes and her rosy mouth. These features seem so simple and yet magnetic. Is this her natural beauty which has been captured or is it something in Sargent’s painting technique. I argue that it is both: Sargent has captured the magnetism of her beauty. This is no simple feat and the best photographers today struggle to achieve this with their instantaneous rendering.

The law of contrasts is the key to understanding Sargent’s technique in this painting as well. When we compare the left side of Lady Agnew’s neck compared to her right, the right side has much more contrast. An artist creates contrast by controlling the tones and values of the colours. The colours on the right side of the neck are painted with greater contrast than the ones on the left. This guides the eye from the left to the right and keeps them on her face. The contrast in her face is also greater than the contrast anywhere else in the painting. 

The Madame X Scandal

The painting for which John Singer Sargent is most famous was both his masterpiece and his downfall. Madame Amelie Gauterie was the beauty of Paris. She was an American expatriate who married a Frenchman. She was resented by French society already for being American and flaunting her beauty and was rumoured for using her beauty to gain social status (while no doubt wishing they could do the same!). Nevertheless, she was so beautiful that artists clamoured to paint her. Sargent also wrote her a letter pleading to be the one to capture her enigmatic beauty.

She agreed and after two years of fruitless sketching, Sargent produced his masterpiece which he called Madame ***. He painted something so provocative that he wanted to protect his and the lady’s reputation by keeping her name away from the title. However, the resemblance was so uncanny and striking that everyone recognised her right away. He re-titled the painting Madame X.

French society absolutely excoriated both the lady and Sargent. Sargent painted her in a tight dress full of enigmatic shadows, with white aristocratic skin. 

 It was a caricature of aristocratic women who presented themselves as being proper and reserved, but the painting revealed that these women too had a sensual and sultry side. He dared to suggest that these upper class women also indulged in the desires of the flesh. As I said in the beginning of this summary, Sargent was a masterful painting and no detail he painted was accidental or arbitrary. 

The pink ear of Madame X was made specifically that colour to remind society that the fairest of aristocratic women had a real flesh underneath that was not so different than the ordinary woman. It collapsed the imagined elitism of the upper class woman. He also, of course, painted her with the left strap down to further accentuate her elongated, beautiful neck. He later repainted the strap back up. He refused to give the painting to Madame Gauterie, afraid that her family would burn it. Today, it can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A photograph cannot capture the enigmatic shadows of Madame X’s infamous dress against the luminescent alabaster skin. I urge you to see this painting in person if you have the opportunity!

The scandal compelled John Singer Sargent to flee to England so that he could restart his career with a new clientele. He moved to the picturesque fairytale village of Broadway, in the Cotswolds of England. It preserves the innocent beauty of pre-industrial era England and served as great inspiration for Sargent.

Painting Fairy Land: Carnation Lily Lily Rose

“Don’t you see it? The way the light quivers across it?”

The magical element of John Singer Sargent’s painting is evident in all of his work, but there is one in particular, “Carnation Lily Lily Rose” painted in 1885. This painting depicts two little girls holding lanterns, standing in a meadow at twilight. They are surrounded by luminescent white lilies, a clear symbol of their purity and innocence. The daisies on the ground glow with the fading light of the sun reflected on their faces and Sargent’s expert brushwork transforms the daisies in little white and gold wisps which we cannot tell are flowers, fireflies or fairies. 

The enchantment of this painting only continues with the girls looking as though it is one girl looking at a mirror image of herself, or a changeling that the fairies have used to mimic her. The imperfect reflection of one girl in the other mimics the title, “Carnation Lily | Lily Rose” with a reflection right in the middle. In fairy folklore, in-between times are most dangerous of all because they are the places where fairies and other mystical creatures have the most power. This is why folk superstition warns against idling in doorways, windows and…at twilight when day changes to night.

Sargent’s stamina, speed and skill made him one of the most excellent en plein air painters of his era and perhaps of all time. There were two innovations that made en plein air painting possible in this time period where it hitherto had been inaccessible to many: the creation of tubed paints and the invention of the railway system. Tubed paints made art supplies much more portable and the railway systems allowed artists to journey into the countryside and return within the same day. Sargent made full use of this new freedom and his assiduous study of light and tonal changes throughout the day, and particular at the times when light changes the most rapidly, led him to be a master at capturing twilight in his masterpiece. 

Sargent’s method of painting was also unique. Each of his paintings look fresh and effortless as if he painted them correctly the first time and without too much trouble. He accomplished this because he was not afraid to scrape everything off if he was not satisfied with how it looked and begin again from scratch. Although it may seem like a lot of trouble to spend hours and weeks on a single painting and then scrape it all away to Sargent it was not a waste because he would begin again with the knowledge of how to paint it properly the next time.

In his drawings he made to prepare the paintings, you will notice that in certain areas the details are better articulated and detailed, such as the profile of the face and the bottom of the neck. These areas are also the place in the painting where we find more contrast. Areas of higher contrast attract the eye and require more detail than areas of lower contrast which are almost blended into the background. Sargent uses tone differences to alter and play with the depth of the painting at different places. 

Painting Dreams and Shadows: El Jaleo

There is more to this world than its material realm. We rarely see things as they materially exist in the world. When a person is grieving the death of a loved one, all the colours are muted to shades of grey. When a person is in love, the sky is bluer, and the sun shines brighter. When we are remembering dreams or emotionally charged memories, they are tilted and exaggerated. 

In his painting, “El Jaleo” John Singer Sargent captures just this. In this painting he depicts a Flamenco dancer in the middle of a bar with a row of nodding guitar players and a cheering crowd. The light shines up from below, illuminating the dancer’s brilliant white dress and cutting across the lines of her body parts angled across the dance floor ready to fall into the next step. It is as if someone has snapped his fingers and paused the scene. Recall, that at this point in history, video cameras were not common. A painter did not have the luxury of studying the movement of a dancer on film in order to prepare his sketches.

Jaleo means ruckus. Watch how she is lit from below rather than above and the shadows on the wall seem to dance with her. This painting is frozen in time but there is so much movement in it because the features are drawn in a moment of tension. The dancer herself is leaning forward as though she is going to fall into the next step. There are very few colours used but the dynamic use of light with the white and black contrast makes every detail stand out anyway. The imbalanced distribution of colours mimics the tilted pose of the dancer. 

The shadows on the wall seem to have a life of their own, more so even than the guitar players sitting in the chairs. No character’s face is clear to see but this does not take away from their personalities. Sargent does not include any detail that is not absolutely crucial to the story. The reason Sargent’s painting are so cohesive and whole despite the asymmetry in the painting itself, is because he did not paint any detail in isolation. After every brush stroke, he would step backward and look at the whole painting before continuing. He would smudge layer after layer to ensure that the painting stood as a whole piece, even throughout the process. This is also evident in Sargent’s painting “Il Solitario”. 

Il Solitario means “the hermit”. In this painting, Sargent conceals two deer and a hermit in the painting by painting all the details using very similar values and few colours. Contrast helps us distinguish objects very quickly whereas similar values conceal them. This technique of painting the forest mimics the way that we actually experience the forest in real life; the details are revealed the longer that we spend time there. The deer and the hermit equally belong to the forest and cannot be easily articulated from it. It’s difficult to tell which details belong to the deer and the hermit and which are leaves and underbrush.

The Alchemist: Fumee D’Ambergris 

We will conclude our lesson on John Singer Sargent with one last mysterious woman. The painting depicts a woman in an ivory gown, standing over a metal dispenser with smoke rising out of it. Her hands are adorned with rings, bracelets and nail polish and lift up her veil in a tent to catch the smoke and bring it to her face. Her eyes are lined with kohl and her gaze is lowered in intense focus upon her task. She stands on colourful rugs with an eastern pattern and stands in front of what appears to be Moroccan architecture. Everything about this painting is enigmatic, perhaps even more so than Madame X. The woman in this painting is supposedly from Tangiers. It is a painting, foremost, about the mystery and allure of those non-European cultures to European painters.

Ambergris is an ancient material that is collected from the guts of a dying whale. Not every dying whale contains ambergris but some do. Ambergris has been used for centuries by North Africans and Middle Easterners as a perfume, a condiment, for medicine and for many other purposes. In this painting, it is amystery why the woman uses it. She is clearly someone very wealthy, as we can tell from her jewellery, makeup and her brilliant silver fibula. The famous writer Herman Melville captures the hilarity of the origin of Ambergris in his book, Moby Dick:

“Who would think then that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regal themselves with an assurance fund in the inglorious bowels of the sick whale.”

The woman in the painting stands straight like the column next to her and is painted in almost the same colour as the building. This suggests that she is like a part of the architecture. She is an extension of her culture and not merely a character standing with the costume and background.

The woman is mysterious because although her face is visible, her eyes are not. Her motives and her facial expressions are both concealed. The little orange cloth peaking out from between the folds of her sleeves draw in the eye because of the shadows and contrasts created there. The orange represents that there is a hidden inner world this woman has that we will never see. Even the contours of her body are impossible to discern under the folds of her clothes. We can only ever see a glimpse of what is underneath from the outside. This is a metaphor for what it is like to see another culture from the outside. We may appreciate its colours and ornaments, but we can never know its innermost secrets as an outsider. Sargent captured not only the beauty of Moroccan culture, but also the distance he felt as an outsider to this culture.

John Singer Sargent was a genius painter because his images took the most essential details and colours and told a story with them. I hope that you have enjoyed learning about him as much as I enjoyed teaching his work.