With impressive new scholarship and many previously unpublished, color-drenched images, this gloriously beautiful book reveals a new aspect of John Singer Sargent's remarkable career. Although best known for his dazzling society portraits, Sargent's landscape oil paintings and watercolors of his travels constituted a far more important aspect of his work than previously realized--collected here in an invaluable chronology, along with letters, diaries, and photos. 250 illustrations, 200 in color.
A generously illustrated gathering of many rarely-seen watercolors by a painter best known for his oils who was also a master of the very difficult medium of watercolor. The book includes 150 4-color images, along with an introductory essay and brief section introductions.
While John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is most known for his salon portraits, his late landscape paintings -- notably those completed from 1905 to 1917 -- mark an important departure for him. in them he explored stylistic avenues suggested by the late impressionists while reflecting a contemporaneous Victorian interest in unspoiled nature. T. J. Jackson Lears places the late landscapes in the context of the time, travel, attention, and exploratory interest Sargent lavished upon them, examining them against the larger background of America's reconsideration of nature's place in the humanities. Sargent's "modernist" tendency as an experimental painter later in his career is the focus of Erica Hirshler's essay. Hilliard T. Goldfarb writes about Sargent's candid, sometimes amusing, often pithy, and practical observations on travel and work, using archival material at the Gardner Museum as well as Sargent's letters and recorded recollections by his circle of friends.
In the decades following the American Civil War and leading up to the First World War, a definitive shift in power took place between Spain and the United States. This original book explores American artists’ perceptions of Spain during this period of turmoil and demonstrates how their responses to Spanish art helped to answer emerging, complex questions about American national identity. M. Elizabeth Boone focuses on works by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, and other American artists who traveled to Spain to study the achievements of such great masters as Murillo, Velázquez, and Goya. The resulting American paintings, some well known and others now largely forgotten, provide intriguing insights not only into the 19th-century American struggle to define itself as an imperial power but also into the relations between the United States and the Spanish-speaking world today.
"The Museum's collection illuminates all aspects of Sargent's career. The drawings and watercolors in particular reflect his activity outside the portrait studio: his sojourns in Spain, Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, and in the Middle East; his enduring fascination with Venice; his holidays in the Italian lake district and the Alps; his tours of North America, including Florida and the Rocky Mountains; his visit as an official war artist to the western front in 1918; and his work as a muralist at the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University's Widener Library."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
"From 1874 to 1882, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) produced more than 200 paintings and water-colours aside from portraiture that chart his development as an artist. The breadth of his achievement includes figures in landscape settings, architectural studies, seascapes, subject paintings, and studies after old masters. From his powerful studies of models in Paris in the mid-1870s to his compelling paintings set in Venice in the early 1880s, the works published in this volume of the catalogue raisonne show the variety of his aesthetic responses." "Working in the studio and en plein air, Sargent travelled widely during the eight years covered in this volume, painting in Paris, Brittany, Capri, Spain, North Africa and Venice." "This is the first time that Sargent's early work has been mapped so comprehensively. With very few exceptions, this book illustrates all the pictures under discussion in colour. Each painting, including several which have never been published before, is documented in depth with full provenance, exhibition history and bibliography. Original research of primary documents and on-site investigations uncovered much new information, presented in critical discussions of subject matter, dating, style, and significance in the artist's career. The volume reproduces a wealth of Sargent's preliminary and related drawings and of comparative works by other artists." --Book Jacket.
"Explores the art of John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture. Argues that the artist was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism"--Provided by publisher.
