A New Side of John Singer Sargent

In an unprecedented collaboration, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum have combined their collections to offer the public an extensive view of John Singer Sargent’s watercolor pieces. The installation, which opens Sunday, brings together 92 watercolors that show a more subtle side of Sargent’s artistic prowess. “This may not be the Sargent you think you know,” says Erica Hirschler, the MFA’s Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings.

The installation is organized not by chronology or location, but by themes that recur throughout Sargent’s artistic career. As all of the pieces were painted between 1902 and 1911, to organize by date would lead to abbreviated segments and fail to capture the continuity of Sargent’s interests across the two collections, Hirschler says. Rather, by centering rooms around around everyday motifs such as “Figures Lying Down” and “At Work,” the museum curators hope to shed light on Sargent’s love of the act of painting.

According to Hirschler, Sargent was particularly fond of painting shades of white, according to Hirschler. Some of Sargent’s more well-known pieces depict mundane scenes, such as a clothesline of white sheets and a marble rock quarry, which are rendered remarkable through his brush strokes. When he did paint portraits in watercolor, he was known to ask his sitters to wear white, and he took special delight in the varying hues of shadow he found in the folds of cloth. His watercolor “Corfu: Lights and Shadows” features a white shed cast in the shade of a tree, which is outside of the frame of the painting. “It is such a non-subject that Sargent makes into a great work of art,” Hirschler says.

By around 1904, Sargent had largely given up painting commissioned portraits, for which he was well known at the time. This was not, however, for lack of interest in painting people. According to Teresa Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Sargent was frustrated and bored with commissioned works. “For Sargent, they had very little in the way of psychological depth,” she says. Thus, the portraits that one does see in the exhibit—such as “The Tramp” and “Bedouins”—are painted with rich layers of both translucent and opaque paint, as well as with a certain sketchiness that allow for deeper meaning than that typically afforded by portraits.

The installation does pair a few watercolor pieces with their oil counterparts of the same image, an arrangement that frequently joins pieces from the Brooklyn and MFA collections. Carbone was, however, quick to note that the watercolors were not merely studies meant to prepare Sargent for his oil pieces, but rather stand-alone masterworks that were complete in themselves.

In transitioning from oil to watercolor, Sargent began to travel around the world, finding his muse in the gardens of Italy and Biblical sites in the Middle East. “He traveled to paint, not the other way around,” Hirschler says. During this time, Sargent did not paint his watercolors with the intention of selling them; many of these location-based studies were bought exclusively by either the Brooklyn Museum or the MFA. In fact, Sargent painted much of the MFA’s collection with the knowledge that the museum would purchase his next installation of watercolors.

Incorporating everything from colorful reflections on the clear water of Venetian canals to elongated shadows of Renaissance statues to a moment of rest atop the Swiss Alps, the MFA and Brooklyn Museum’s installation allows visitors to view both the everyday and the majestic through Sargent’s eyes. “We hope [the installation] is an inspiration for people to look around them and see sunlight captured and held,” Hirschler says.

—Staff writer Anneli L. Tostar can be reached at anneli.tostar@thecrimson.com.