Sargent’s charming works gloss over an inner turmoil
Sargent: The Watercolours Dulwich Picture Gallery
The “Van Dyck of our times”: that was how Rodin described the highsociety portraitist John Singer Sargent (18561925). Although he lived through Modernism, Sargent remained unaffected by it – channelling, instead, the glamour of great art from the past. During his career, he produced more than 800 portraits, and his famous depictions of Edwardian noblemen and eminent Americans still look dazzling today.
Yet Sargent himself felt constrained by the demands of his profession. Churning out so many flattering images eventually took its toll: in 1907, he announced that he wished to give up portraiture altogether; and whenever he felt most hemmed in, and wished to reinvigorate his creative energies, he turned from oils to watercolour. As an adult, he travelled extensively – spending his summers, after 1900, in various places from the Alps to the Middle East, often with his sisters in tow. And, wherever he went, he made breezy watercolours, recording his impressions.
Forming a kind of travel diary, these gave Sargent great joy and satisfaction: one visitor to his London studio observed that watercolours, rather than grand oil paintings, covered the walls. Indeed, over the course of his life, he created more than a thousand of them. Eighty have been assembled for Sargent: The Watercolours, a new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London. It is the first such show in Britain in nine decades.
On paper, it’s a great idea, because it promises a revelatory take on a well-known figure, revealing a side to Sargent – intimate, informal, relaxed – that most of us do not know.
And the first thing to say about Sargent’s watercolours is that, despite the conventional nature of their subject matter (there are lots of Alpine landscapes and seemingly endless views of Venice, a city he dearly loved), they are often gorgeous and always virtuosic.
As a student in Paris, Sargent learned from his teacher, Carolusduran, “to express the maximum by means of the minimum”, and this precept is evident throughout the show at Dulwich. With a few deft flicks of his brush, setting down, say, a pale blue wash to denote shadow, he could nonchalantly evoke complex architectural forms.
He was also a master at summoning effulgent effects of light. His unusual view of the pavilion on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, seen from below against a bright blue sky, turns this small 15th-century structure into a repository for a sphere of fiery radiance. His cropped picture of the underside of a Spanish fountain is, likewise, a tour de force: two decorative cherubs on its base appear almost to throb with glowing light.
Time and again, Sargent relished the technical challenge of rendering the play of light and shadow upon a white surface, such as pale Venetian masonry, irradiated by sunlight, or a long, rippling dress, as in The Lady with the Umbrella (1911). Modelled by one of his nieces, this dress, as rendered by Sargent, has the appearance of a glacier.
It is striking, too, to note Sargent’s obsession with water. As well as fountains, there are pictures of mountain streams and torrents, and a refined early beachscape. In almost every room, we encounter boats bobbing in seaside harbours. San Vigilio (1913), an image of the shoreline of Lake Garda in northern Italy, is delicious, as is a panoramic view, from 1891, of Istanbul’s skyline, seen across the Bosporus.
The second room, “Cities” (the exhibition is arranged according to theme rather than chronologically), is dominated by Sargent’s views of Venice. It becomes apparent that his preferred vantage point wasn’t at street level, but low down in a gondola, looking up at palazzos from the green waters of the Grand Canal. This “gondola perspective” is instructive, because it epitomises Sargent’s preoccupation with water, but it is also fascinating psychologically – evidence, perhaps, of a restless temperament, the product of an itinerant childhood spent shuttling between various European cities and spa resorts.
For all the technical brilliance on display, though, elements of the exhibition left me slightly cold. In part, I concede, my own prejudice may have been to blame. It’s hard, initially, to see beyond the fridgemagnet clichés of the subjects, especially those vistas of Venice (even if Sargent painted unexpected aspects of the city). And that underwhelming first impression is exacerbated by a cautious hang: I wish there had been fewer works on each wall, and that the artworks had been arranged with a more syncopated rhythm, rather than presented relentlessly along a line.
If this sounds trivial, here is a more profound concern: Sargent’s watercolours do not convey much sense of his feelings for his surroundings. His fluency, as an artist, is not in question. Sometimes, though, he was too suave for his own good.
Almost every watercolour in the show has a pretty, sunny quality – which is perfectly pleasant, and may well prove popular with the gallery’s core audience. What his watercolours lack, though, is emotional heft. According to a relative, who witnessed him at work, Sargent set about painting his watercolours with great energy, muttering at intervals, “Demons! Demons!” or “The devil’s own!” Yet little, if any, of this supposed struggle is visible at Dulwich.
Indeed, it doesn’t matter what Sargent decided to paint – Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, or, surprisingly, a group of alligators that he saw during a visit to Florida in 1917: everything has the same charming, cosmopolitan gloss.
Moreover, his painterly eloquence can yield absurd effects: just look at his kitsch pictures from 1918 of soldiers in northern France, where he worked as a war artist. Incredibly, a view of a mangled tank, from the same year, is devoid of darkness or pathos.
It takes a while to register the mildness and emotional detachment of Sargent’s watercolours, because, to begin with, you are seduced by his scintillating touch. When you do, though, it seems curious: why was he so reluctant to reveal his true feelings? The sensuousness of several male nudes in the final room suggests one possible answer.
Whether he had something more profound to tell us, about himself or the world around him, is hard to say. It’s a shame: even in private, this urbane artist was impeccably polite.
Until Oct 8. Details: dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
‘Whether he had something more profound to tell us, about himself or the world around him, is hard to say’