Sargent's Italy

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

John Singer Sargent was born in Italy to expatriate American parents, and it was to Italy that he returned again and again to paint luscious landscapes, somber interiors, evocative genre scenes, and penetrating portraits. The various locales where he painted, many off the beaten path, continued to be a source of inspiration throughout his long career. An exhibition that delves into this subject is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from February 2 to May 11. The show is entitled Sargent and Italy, and after it closes in California it travels to the Denver Art Museum, where it may be seen from June 28 through September 21. The exhibition comprises more than seventy-five oil and watercolor paintings ranging from early works executed in Naples and on Caprito those painted in Venice, the Alps, Carrara, San Vigilio on Lake Garda, Florence, and Rome.

In 1878 Sargent traveled to the island of Capri, where he fell in with a colony of painters. He painted more than one picture of a local girl named Rosina Ferram whom he described as "a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut-brown, with a mass of blue-black hair; very beautiful, and of an Arab type." He not only painted her in repose but also dancing on a rooftop.

The Italian city that perhaps most captured Sargent's imagination, as it did Whistler's, was Venice. And like Whistler, while there he shunned painting tourist sites in favor of partial building facades, back alleys, and dark interiors. He was particularly struck by the life of the men and women of the working class and the seamier side of the city. The dark palette of his early Venetian paintings is in marked contrast to the brilliant and shimmering watercolors he painted there after about 1900.

Starting in the early 1900s, Sargent usually spent part of the summer in the Italian Alps, painting a series of pictures of his friends and relatives dressed in exotic costumes and at leisure. These paintings have a bold, experimental, and somewhat abstract quality and, while some were painted for exhibition and sale, others he kept or gave to friends. The latter works are revealing about the state of mind and personality of the artist and are some of his most ravishing works.

The catalogue of the exhibition is edited by Bruce Robertson. It contains essays by Jane Dini, Ilene Susan Fort, Stephanie L. Herdrich, R. W. B. Lewis, and Richard Ormond. It is available by telephoning 800-288-2129.