John Singer Sargent

Born:
Florence, Italy 1856
Died:
London, England 1925


Active in:

• Boston, Massachusetts
• Paris, France

One of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of beautiful women and influential men. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, actress Ellen Terry and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sat for him.

Raised in Europe by an American expatriate family, Sargent attended art schools in Paris. Precociously gifted, he soon assimilated lessons from the old masters, the contemporary Impressionists and the Spanish painters Velázquez and Goya, producing a spectacular array of exciting and masterful paintings while only in his 20s. At the 1884 Paris Salon, however, his portrait of the 23-year-old American Virginie Gautreau, shown with bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment. The picture, which became known as Madame X, crippled Sargent's hopes of establishing himself as a portrait painter in Paris. In 1886 he moved to London, and in just a few years became the most admired and sought-after portrait painter in Britain and the United States.

But Sargent was much more than a portrait painter. He was also a prolific landscape and figure artist, producing more than 1,000 dazzling oils and watercolors

This is the only painting they will quiz you on. So you need to know everything about it.

John Singer Sargent
Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler
1893
oil
49 3/8 x 40 1/2 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chanler A. Chapman

According to Sargent, twenty-six-year old Elizabeth Chanler had "the face of the Madonna and the eyes of a child." This portrait shows a beautiful, well-bred woman who has learned to be strong. When Elizabeth was still a girl, her mother died, leaving her to help care for seven younger brothers and sisters. Sargent painted her while she was in London for a brother's wedding, and the artist composed the portrait as if to suggest a turmoil of emotions in his sitter.

The top half of the portrait is ordered and still. Elizabeth's gaze is direct, her face centered between two paintings: a Madonna and Child and a figure of an old woman copied from Frans Hals. But the lower half is full of tension. Her arms, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and the pillows seem to wrestle with one another; only her clasped fingers and elbows keep everything under control. Perhaps the artist wished to show Elizabeth as a woman who, despite early hardships, was neither maiden nor matron. Sargent was often dismissed by his contemporaries as a "society portraitist," but his paintings always convey the human story behind the image.

“Bessie” Chanler's determination and strength of character emerge forcefully in Sargent's remarkable portrait. Only nine years old when her mother died, Bessie shouldered responsibility for her seven younger siblings. Wealth and social position did not shield her from further tragedy; after developing a disease of the hip at age thirteen, she lived for two years strapped to a board to prevent curvature of the spine. Yet she traveled extensively, spending time in Asia and Europe, and eventually married John Jay Chapman, a family friend. Sargent greatly admired his subject, observing that she possessed “the face of the Madonna and the eyes of the Child.”

http://americanart.si.edu/education/insights/pictures/sargent/
This link is interactive. Scroll over the picture for more info.

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/insight/tours/sargent/index.html
(this article is 4 pages long, make sure you read them all).

Some info about the Fountain painting.

http://si-siris.blogspot.com/2011/07/john-singer-sargent-at-smithsonian.html


For additional information and better understanding.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6F-Kc-qH0U