John Singer Sargent
Watercolors
Boston Museum of Fine
Arts
Through January 20,
2014
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| Corfu Cottage |
This review was originally published on the UMass History Department blog.
I
know someone who teaches at a private school because it supports his folk music
career, a yoga teacher who used to pay the bills through editing, and a
landscape painter whose paychecks come from illustration work. As songwriter
Charlie King once put it, “Our lives are more than our work/And our work is
more than our jobs.” Keep that in mind when you venture to Boston to see John
Singer Sargent’s watercolors.
And venture forth you should–there are nearly 100 works he
produced between 1902-11 and there’s not a dud in the lot. These images are
John Singer Sargent as few of us think of him. Sargent (1856-1925) was renowned
as the portrait artist of choice for the Gilded Age elite, and small wonder–few
artists of his day matched his eye or technique in oil and few in all of art
history had his mastery of painting white on white or black on black. So good
was Sargent that our mental images of late 19th century upper crust
Boston are largely conjured from paintings hung upon the walls of the city’s
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).
As sublime as the oils are, the MFA’s watercolor show is a
breath of fresh air. Several forces collided that led Sargent away from formal
portraiture and freed him to produce the bold gouaches, washes, and watercolors
on display. First, as in our time, he who is in fashion one season is bound to
be out the next. As Gilded Age society waned at the fin de siècle, so too did demand for Sargent’s services. He was, in
short, yesterday’s painter. But a painter he remained–one who mastered the
craft of the past and was vitally interested in the new. His oils occasionally
showed familiarity with Impressionism, but his watercolors embody his love of the form. With fewer commissions
that he had to paint, Sargent produced things that were personally meaningful.
Second, and more importantly, Sargent was as bored with
society as it had become with him. He moved easily among American elites, but
he was trained in Europe and was, in many ways, more continental than Back Bay
Boston. The official story is that he was a bachelor, but he was probably gay.
He certainly spent a lot of time abroad and was rumored to let his hair down
considerably when outside of Victorian parlors. We see only echoes of Sargent’s
audacious side in America–notably his scandalous Madame X (1889), but
most of the offerings in the MFA come from his overseas sojourns: the watery
blues of Venice, the stark contrasts of Palestine, the blinding sunlight of
Corfu, muscled quarry workers in Italy, the lush mountains of Switzerland….
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| Portuguese Boats |
Call
it reverse Madame X in that what he
produced in Europe is only occasionally controlled. In a superb video at the
end of the exhibition, painter Monika de Vries seeks to reproduce Sargent’s Portuguese Boats and argues that he
worked quickly and impressionistically, as if he were a man freeing his hand
and his soul. Forget the dignified drawing rooms of his oils; here we see
louche gondoliers lounging in their boats, bold Bedouins glaring full-face
frontward, carefree males plopped lazily outside a government building, and
stone cutters smoking and enjoying their lunch. We get the idea that Sargent
was probably more comfortable with this lot than the business class of Beacon
Hill.
Above
all there is the riot of color. Forget white dresses against a white
background. In his watercolors Sargent gives us white laundry drying above a
green lawn–except that lawn is splashed with pinks, yellows, browns, blues,
purples, and mauves. There is a magnificent sun-dappled whitewashed cottage from
Corfu in which the spidery shadows are just about every color except white.
Toward the end of his life Sargent had a last Boston
hurrah–the stunning murals painted for the Boston Public Library. These too are
better known than his watercolors, but once you see those, you’re likely to
conclude that the happiest period of Sargent’s life was the one in which he was
out of the public limelight and free to follow his muses rather than his
commissions.
Rob Weir
