Watercolors: Sargent's pictorial diary

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by Carol Troyen

Boston's disappointment at missing these watercolors was intensified when they were exhibited to great acclaim at the Boston Art Club in April 1909, and the museum's desire to acquire examples of its own only increased. Thus the rumor that Sargent was preparing another group of watercolors for Knoedler's caused the Museum of Fine Arts to dispatch its curator of paintings, Jean Guiffrey (1870-1952), to meet Sargent in London and secure the pictures for Boston before they went on sale. Guiffrey was successful, acquiring forty-five watercolors for $250 each. He returned to triumphant headlines. The Boston Transcript of January 6, 1912, crowed "Art Museum Buys Fine Sargents," calling the purchase "a splendid coup," and "the most important acquisition in watercolors ever made." It bragged that the group was "superior in quality to [Brooklyn's]."

Hailed by the art critic Royal Cortissoz (1869-1948) as "the great modern virtuoso of the medium, a Paganini of the brush,"(2) Sargent is celebrated for the watercolors he painted shortly after the turn of the century. He made his living by painting society portraits in oils, and turned to watercolors while on holiday in the Italian Alps or Tuscany or on the sun-drenched Greek island of Corfu. His subjects were more experimental and personal than his work in oils: corners of Tuscan gardens, Alpine meadows, family and friends casually posed and sometimes dressed in exotic costumes.

Like his oils, Sargent's watercolors soon became extremely desirable, especially because, for years, he declined to sell them. Instead, according to one of his biographers, he "doled them out for wedding presents, birthdays, Christmas and a general expression of greeting. They were...his style of postcard."(3)

Sargent insisted that the watercolors he offered in 1909 and 1911 be sold en bloc so that the thematic groups would remain intact, and only to a major museum. By dramatically holding out for a big sale, even though he could have made more money by offering the works individually, he successfully increased the demand for his watercolors. In addition to the collections acquired by Brooklyn and Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City bought ten from the artist in 1915, and in 1917 the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, purchased eleven. These four museums remain the major repositories of Sargent's watercolors today.

Boston's watercolors, painted between 1909 and 1911, read like Sargent's passport. "Other travellers wrote their diaries," noted his second cousin Mary Newbold Patterson Hale,

he painted his, and his sisters, his nieces and nephews, Miss Wedgewood, the Misses Barnard, Mr. and Mrs. de Glehn, Mr. Harrison are all on its pages.... Palestine, the Dolomites, Corfu, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Norway, Greece, Egypt, France, and the Balearic Islands are on record.(4)

The watercolors in the Museum of Fine Arts document Sargent's holiday itineraries, his pictorial ambitions, his companions, and something of the relationships between them. They demonstrate his unfettered joy in the watercolor medium and his technical prowess, for in 1910 he was at the height of his powers. Away from the pressures of commissions, critics, and the academy on the one hand, and the avant-garde on the other, Sargent was free to take his box of paints, his tripod, his block of watercolor paper, and his umbrella to keep off the glare,(5) and paint exactly as he liked. Boston's watercolors are among the most frequently exhibited of his works in the medium. They were immensely influential in their day; even Sargent's detractors found them dazzling.(6)

The artist's pictorial diary for 1909 begins in September in Venice, where he had been a frequent visitor both in the 1880s, when he painted a series of oils of the back streets and lower classes, and in the early twentieth century, when he made watercolors of local landmarks that were as sparkling and lively as the earlier oils were mysterious and dark. He was not immune to tourist attractions, but he had a genius for seeking out the unhackneyed perspective and telling detail. Thus he painted the popular churches of Santa Maria della Salute and Il Gesuati, but he never showed the whole facade; and when he came to the Rialto Bridge, he focused on the underside [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], as if to illustrate John Ruskin's description of it:

At the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent.(7)

The dark and ponderous arc of the bridge, filling nearly half the sheet, is dematerialized by the reflections dancing across its underside, while the gondolier, whose graceful body is formed by wisps of opaque white paint, guides the eye from cool shadow into brilliant light.

Sargent visited Venice with his frequent traveling companions - his sister Emily (1857-1936), a watercolorist, and the painters Jane (1873-1961) and Wilfred (1870-1951) de Glehn. In October the group decamped for Corfu, a fashionable resort patronized by the German and British aristocracy. There Sargent painted a number of views of the Villa Sotiriotisa, where he stayed, as well as the island's olive and orange groves and tempting slivers of the Ionian Sea glimpsed through a screen of cypresses. In these pictures Sargent carne as close as he ever did to an impressionist aesthetic, especially in the most sparkling of them, a view of a small stucco building in the park of the royal villa Monrepos, which reveals his fascination with the effects of direct and reflected light [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED]. With nothing more complex than liquid strokes of pale blue on rough-textured white paper that evokes the coarse stucco, Sargent suggests the dancing shadows cast by overhanging trees and, by extension, the pleasures of a Mediterranean holiday in which the baking heat is relieved by balmy breezes and a glimpse of the sea just beyond.