Sargent, John Singer

Sargent, John Singer (1856–1925). American painter, chiefly famous as the outstanding society portraitist of his age—Rodin called him ‘the Van Dyck of our times'. He was born in Florence, the son of wealthy parents, and he had an international upbringing and career—indeed he has been described as ‘an American born in Italy, educated in France, who looks like a German, speaks like an Englishman, and paints like a Spaniard’ ( William Starkweather, ‘The Art of John S. Sargent', Mentor, October 1924). His ‘Spanishness’ refers to his deep admiration for Velázquez, for although he was encouraged to paint directly by Charles Carolus-Duran (1838–1917), with whom he studied in Paris, 1874–6, the virtuoso handling of paint that characterized his style derived more particularly from Old Masters such as Velázquez and Frans Hals (he visited Madrid and Haarlem to study their work in 1879–80). From 1885 he was based in London, but he continued to travel extensively and often visited America. The lavish elegance of his work brought him unrivalled success, and his portraits of the wealthy and privileged convey with brilliant bravura the glamour and opulence of high-society life. Even in his lifetime he was deprecated for superficiality of characterization by some critics and fellow artists (who no doubt found it easy to be jealous of his success), but although psychological penetration was not his strength, he was admirably varied in his response to each sitter's individuality, and for sheer beauty of brushwork his portraits are unsurpassed in 20th-century art.

As with many successful portraitists, Sargent's heart lay elsewhere; indeed he came to hate portrait painting, referring to it as ‘a pimp's profession', and after about 1907 he took few commissions. Despite his sophistication and charm and the entrée to high society that his success gave him, he was a very private person, who never married and led a quiet life. He loved painting landscape water-colours, showing a technique as dashing in this medium as in his oil paintings, and from 1890 he devoted much of his energies to ambitious allegorical mural schemes in the Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston: ‘Landscape I like, but, most of all, decoration, where the really aesthetic side of art counts for so much more.’ For the Library his subject was The History of Religion (his friend E. A. Abbey painted a series on The History of the Holy Grail for the same building at the same period). Sargent began work in 1890 and the paintings (in oil on canvas) were installed in stages between 1895 and 1916. They led to the commission from the Museum, for which he painted subjects from classical mythology between 1916 and 1925, completing the work shortly before his death. (As models for the Danaides he used dancing girls from the chorus-line of the Ziegfeld Follies.) His murals are in a high-flown, sometimes rather dreary Symbolist manner and have evoked mixed reactions. A very different side to his talents is revealed in the enormous Gassed (Imperial War Museum, London, 1918), which he painted as an Official War Artist. It has remarkable tragic power and is one of the greatest pictures inspired by the First World War. Sargent's reputation plummetted after his death (in 1929 Roger Fry called him ‘undistinguished as an illustratror and non-existent as an artist'), but it has soared again since the 1970s.