John Singer Sargent Watercolors

Paintings

Moves to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Oct 13, 2013 – Jan 20, 2014

I have a Parisian friend, a devoted and masterful plein air watercolorist, who, for years, has spoken about wanting to see the trove of Sargent watercolors from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

This exhibit of almost one hundred paintings combines a hefty number of those with an array from the collection of The Brooklyn Museum and collectively gives far more than a taste from the Sargent corpus, indeed much more like an entire tasting menu from a master chef.

Sargent is a great painter, both in oils and in watercolors, and though not known for indulging in a particularly revolutionary style, conveys his subjects with grace and skill.

A master of balance and taste, he is a true Apollonian. Especially in watercolor, the delicate offset between construction and spontaneity becomes very clear and one gets to see, in his evolving style, how Sargent subtly integrates those guiding principles.

This is most evident in this superb selection which ranges through enough of Sargent’s career to demonstrate the growth of his depth of vision and spontaneity. Though, from the beginning, his work exhibits his great talent, one can actually observe, across the years, how his mastery evolves. It is a subtle, but evident, development in Sargent’s execution that makes some of the later works – from about 1909 on – shimmer.

Sargent traveled widely and painted everywhere he went, from more familiar European and American settings to the islands of Greece, to the Middle East, and beyond. The current exhibition gives a fabulous sampling of his work from those various sojourns, and, through this adeptly mounted painterly journal, gives a vivid sense of both his generalized mastery, and of his stylistic evolution over the course of time.

– BADMan