In the eighth volume of their catalogue raisonné, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1908-1913, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray focus on landscapes and figure paintings, dividing the work into seven chapters based on geography, from Majorca to Lake Garda, with an additional chapter on England and elsewhere. The period covered coincides with Sargent’s decision in 1908 to turn away from portraiture, or at least the formal and commissioned portraits that had established his reputation and wealth. Portraits of family and close friends still abound, however, and include some of the most engaging and carefully documented works of this period: Mosquito Nets of 1908, for example, with Emily Sargent, Sargent’s sister, and Eliza Wedgwood relaxing at their house in Majorca (not, as the catalogue states, “enjoying a siesta”, since both appear to be reading). The well-known watercolour of the pair of the same year, now at Tate Britain, depicts Emily Sargent totally engaged in her sketching, while Wedgwood sits contemplatively at her side.
Sargent was an inveterate traveller and revisited many places he had been to in his youth. Ormond and Kilmurray in turn retraced his steps as assiduously as possible, admitting that this was “not particularly onerous”. New photographs by Christopher Calnan document some of Sargent’s motifs, while many of Sargent’s own photographs, often stereoscopic views, are also illustrated. The authors have managed to establish where the vast majority of the works were produced—no mean feat given how little documentation Sargent left. A plethora of dazzling watercolours and oils are beautifully illustrated and discussed. From studies of pomegranates to watercolours showing the labourers in the quarry at Carrara in Italy, Sargent showed his skills in a huge range of subjects—always, it seems, with family and friends, many artists themselves, hovering nearby.
In 1911 it was the turn of Sargent’s niece Rose-Marie Ormond, the second daughter of Sargent’s sister Violet (and Richard Ormond’s aunt), then 17, to star in Nonchaloir, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This painting warrants one of the longest single entries in the catalogue, and it is Rose-Marie and her husband Robert André-Michel whose story is told in John Singer Sargent and His Muse. Robert was killed in 1914, Rose-Marie was crushed under a bombed church vault in 1918 and their short lives, tragic but in reality an addendum to our understanding and knowledge of Sargent, are dwelt on in that book.
Friends and acquaintances from across the arts are the subject of Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, the catalogue of an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that closed in October. Leading Sargent scholars Marc Simpson, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Erica Hirshler and Trevor Fairbrother have contributed, with Barbara Weinberg providing a context of cultural and political events, while the accompanying John Singer Sargent: Painting Friends is a brief introduction to the artist’s portraiture, including 30 key images from the exhibition. The book is arranged by place as Sargent moved from Paris to Broadway in England’s Cotswolds, then to London, later working in Boston and New York. A catch-all topic, “Sargent in Europe, 1899-1914”, overlaps in part with the material elaborated in the catalogue raisonné. It requires some effort to extract from this categorisation the extent of Sargent’s immersion in the varied worlds of the arts. From Claude Monet to Henry James, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ellen Terry, Sargent knew and painted them all.
It was Sargent’s milieu—the upper class, the wealthy and the successful—that has in many ways dogged his reputation and led to him being denigrated, not least by Roger Fry, with whom he had clashed at the time of the famous Manet and the Post-
Impressionists exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in 1910, and whose spiteful comments after his death have continued to be cited to this day. Multilingual and multi-talented, Sargent nonetheless remained an outsider in British society, his fame no doubt provoking envy, his reluctance to align himself with any art movement distancing him from a history of art that is dominated by Modernism, and his eminence and significance, it appears, requiring reiteration with every publication and exhibition of his work.
• Kathleen Adler is a freelance art historian and curator. She was formerly director of education at the National Gallery, London
John Singer Sargent: Figures and
Landscapes, 1908-1913
Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray
Yale University Press, 424pp, £50 (hb)
John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss
Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman
Rowman and Littlefield, 340pp,
£24.95 (hb)
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends
Richard Ormond with Elaine Kilmurray
National Portrait Gallery, 256pp, £40 (hb)
John Singer Sargent: Painting Friends
Barbara Dayer Gallati
National Portrait Gallery, Skira Rizzoli, 96pp, £10 (pb)