John Singer Sargent earned for himself fame and fortune as a painter of realistic portraits of society ladies adorned in fashionable and elaborate dress and carefully posed so that the viewer of the painting knew that they were posed. After that period, which covered about the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century, and after which time Sargent was known as a painter of the previous generation, he tried to reinvent his style, however much, when he went back to doing an occasional portrait, he returned to his original realistic style. The new style was to be a take on Impressionism, and it did not catch on, however much he worked at it. Now, there are other great painters who are able to develop alternative styles that are impressive, Picasso and Matisse among them, Picasso, in fact, inventing a new style every decade of his career, but that was not to be for Sargent, and so his efforts in that direction draw attention to how difficult it is to think up a new way of seeing especially after having so thoroughly mastered a previous one.
A commendable example of Sargent’s late style, perhaps because it is still a portrait, is “Charles Deering”, the subject caught looking up from his chair, as if unposed and caught in a snapshot, as already may have been the case when the painting was made in 1917. Surrounding him are flowers befitting the semi-tropical setting of Miami, where the picture was made. There is more background of foliage than there usually is in Sargent, and the color theme of the picture is the white of Deerings clothing against the white or slightly bluish white of his chair. There are a lot of white highlights as if the light source created a glare effect that in effect created a screen through which the portrait was to be viewed. That effect can be seen as either dramatic or distracting. The brushstrokes in the ;portrait are looser than they had been in Sargent’s major works, both broader and more wavy, and the subject has an interesting face, somewhat weathered, the face itself with the realism of hard edged lines that Sargent had used earlier.
Now, Sargent had used white as the basic motif of a number of his realistic paintings, including “A Morning Walk”, where a woman in a white dress, white hat and white parasol is carefully backgrounded with blue and green. That was in 1888. His painting “Bridge of Sighs'', from 1908, is quite different. It shows a sundrenched line of Venitian buildings on the left, the buildings on the right in shadows, while the gondoliers are dressed in white and the water in the canal has white highlights, thew hole thing a matter of broad brushstrokes so that it is an exercise in color rather than in realism.
A number of other of Sargent’s late paintings use the same effect of having an overexposed look, full of glare, created by his use of white, in both his landscapes and cityscapes. The same style shows up in, for example, “The Morane”, which is of a depression in the land; in “Steps of a Palace”, which is a picture of an Italian piece of architecture; and even in “Dugout”, where white is used to highlight the entrance into a cave under a World War I trench. That look, I think, distracts from what it would portray but which can be understood as a way to make these scenes Sargent’s own, his own version of Impressionism, though I think they are the product of the lame end of that movement. Sargent was colorful in the way of the Impressionists, but he did not borrow their subject matter of crowded street scenes and bars, sticking instead with architecture and women and men as if they were posed for portraits. The Impressionist look does not enrich the subject matter but highlight technique imposed on subject matter, something that the mainline Impressionists also risked. That painterly style was a large part of what Sargent did with his later years, and shows only how hard it is to paint, to have a way of seeing, no matter how well he had accomplished that in his previous realistic style. Indeed, he tried his hand at even another style. He painted mythological figures in a Pre-Raphaelite style, as if to catch up with that wave of British artists.
Sargent did not have to go either the Impressionist or the Pre-Raphaelite route to remain original. It is to be remembered that by this time he was a wealthy man and so did not need society ladies to serve as models for portraits their rich fathers would pay handsomely. But Sargent did not decide to portray other English or American girls because he was only interested in the stars in the sky, the fabulously perfected and groomed women who made it into his studio, as a way to convey the essence of womanhood. But he did try out another option that took advantage of his insights as a realistic portraitist. He did some wonderful portraits of Mediterranean women, and so is like Matisse in Morocco or some other Orientalist in allowing himself to try to penetrate these seemingly impenetrable souls. There is “Head of a Capri Girl”, which he did in 1878, where he exhibits a face with an olive hue whose facial structure is very different from the Anglo-Saxon faces of most of his subjects., and one which he captures not only for its type but for its disinctiveness. There is a person living inside that face. There is also the aforementioned nude portrait (at least of her legs and backside) of an Egyptian woman, notable for the color of her skin, not quite chocolate and yet definitely tawny. Sargent never lost his sense of color, and so one could well imagine him joining Gauguin in painting women less self-conscious about their beauty than were his society subjects. But Sargent did not go off in that direction, though his portraits of Italian women do capture some mystery perhaps because of the expectation that they led more secluded lives than his elite subjects, caught up as these Mediterranean women were in a world still ruled by peasant custom. I do not know whether that is a true perception, in that the elite women were sheltered and bound by custom, but their independant looks suggested that they felt themselves to be in control of their lives and that their education and sophistication made them the sort of people who could become independent in ways unfathomed by the Mediterranean women. Another bit of food for thought provided by the ever fecund John Singer Sargent.