Insightful essays by the world’s leading experts enhance this book and introduce readers to the full sweep of Sargent’s accomplishments in the medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist. BY the time John Singer Sargent reached his mid-40s at the beginning of the 20th century, he had long been saluted as the best society portrait painter of the Gilded Age. Going beyond turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. Presenting nearly 100 works of art, this book is the first major publication of Sargent’s watercolours in twenty years.Įach chapter highlights a different subject or theme that attracted the artist’s attention during his travels through Europe and the Middle East: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. John Singer Sargents approach to watercolor was unconventional. In watercolour as opposed to oils his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected. One reviewer in England, where Sargent spent much of his adult life, called his work ‘swagger watercolours’.įor Sargent, however, the watercolours were not so much about swagger as about a new way of thinking. John Singer Sargent’s approach to watercolour was unconventional.ĭisregarding late-nineteenth-century aesthetic standards that called for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike.
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