Watercolors: Sargent's pictorial diary

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1996 by Carol Troyen

Sargent spent a month in Carrara and then returned to London, where he began to prepare his summer's work for exhibition at Knoedler's. Although his watercolors were rendered with such fluency as to seem effortless, they were, in fact, the product of careful planning beforehand and thoughtful editing afterwards. Thus, although the Museum of Fine Arts was able to buy the bulk of his watercolor production from the summers of 1909 to 1911, it did not get them all. Sargent retained some for himself, a few went to other owners, and presumably a number were destroyed by the artist.

After the spectacular purchase of 1912, the Museum of Fine Arts continued to add to its collection of Sargent's watercolors, which now numbers sixty-one, ranging from a view of the Eiger peak from the town of Murren, Switzerland, done when Sargent was a teenager, to a small group of sketches for the murals he painted in the museum in the early 1920s.

The most recent addition is perhaps the most compelling and, as a portrait, is unique in the museum's collection of Sargent's watercolors [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIII OMITTED]. The subject, Alice Runnells James (d. 1957) of Chicago, had married William James (1882-1962), the son of the philosopher and nephew of the novelist, in 1912. She was a close friend of Sargent's sister Emily, and her husband was one of a number of Boston portraitists who worked in Sargent's orbit. Sargent painted Alice James in the summer of 1921 when he was a guest at the James family compound in Chocorua, New Hampshire. A woman of energy and great charm, Alice James won the affection of the senior Jameses, particularly Henry. However, she was frequently ill, and Sargent portrayed her as an invalid. The pale colors - a faded peach, a thinned-down ocher, and a quiet aquamarine - point up her frailty and physical withdrawal. Yet something in the listless posture and weary expression suggests that her fragility might have been more than physical. At times she rebelled against the unrelenting verbal brilliance of the family, but saddled with a father-in-law who could pronounce that her "invalidism...wrought refinement in her inwardly,"(15) she more often fell victim to the family's intensely analytical probings. Sargent's portrait offers moving testimony to the cost of being a woman in the James family.

From its high-water mark in the decade before 1920, Sargent's reputation began eroding about the time of the James portrait, especially in America. A. E. Gallatin, writing in 1922, was typical of progressive critics when he observed that Sargent's watercolors were "not as profound interpretations of nature as Homer's and Marin's...who felt much more deeply," although he grudgingly admired "the marvellous dexterity displayed by Sargent in his watercolours... [their] ease, as well as their superb breadth of treatment."(16)

Sargent's watercolors were paired with Winslow Homer's in various exhibitions held between 1916 and 1923. In that cosmopolitan era Sargent's international persona and his "wonderful mastery, tact, and elegance" were seen as equal in merit to Homer's "virility and love of nature."(17) But by the time of Sargent's death in 1925 an increasingly isolationist outlook caused his sophistication to be viewed with suspicion, again, particularly in America. The memorial exhibitions of his work in New York and Boston were both extremely well attended and highly controversial. Coinciding as they did with the acceptance of modernism and the popularity of such rising stars among watercolorists as John Marin (1870-1953), these shows brought cheers from conservative critics while the avant-garde faulted Sargent's work for its lack of connectedness to American life, and saw his technical brilliance as a dubious virtue.