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John Singer Sargent:
Portraits in Charcoal
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the leading portraitist of his day. Born in Italy to expatriate American parents, he established his career in London, where he catered to an elite clientele from the United States, Britain, and the rest of Europe. Over time, the insatiable demand for portraits frustrated Sargent and interfered with his work on other artistic endeavors. In 1907, at the height of his success, he astonished the transatlantic art world by abandoning portrait painting. For the rest of his life, when he explored likeness and identity, he did so on his own terms, through the medium of charcoal.
Compared with oil paintings, charcoal drawings were quick and relatively inexpensive to produce. In a single sitting of less than three hours, Sargent could complete a drawing that conveyed a vivid sense of immediacy and psychology. Although many of the drawings were commissioned, others were made for the artist's own pleasure and given as gifts.
The drawings in this exhibition reveal the extraordinary versatility of Sargent's work in charcoal, which proved to be the ideal medium for portraying the greatest luminaries of his time. As a critic predicted in 1916, "Future admirers will seek to distill from the charcoal the spirit of our age." |