Watercolors: Sargent's pictorial diary

Our own era has reversed this judgment. Enthusiasm for Sargent's watercolors is as great today as when they were first displayed. Their range of subject matter and artistic virtuosity are once more celebrated, and their subtle content is beginning to be explored. The great Boston critic William Howe Downes (1854-1941), praising the museum's 1912 acquisition, pronounced Sargent's watercolors "so modern, so original, so playful, and so thoroughly secular and intimate"(18) - an assessment that resounds today.

This article is dedicated to Trevor J. Fairbrother, a distinguished Sargent scholar and a valued colleague. I would like to thank my associates Clifford S. Ackley, Sue Welsh Reed, Roy Perkinson, and Annette Manick of the department of prints, drawings, and photographs for allowing me the privilege of studying these watercolors and for their many helpful observations about them. I am also grateful to Cynthia Purvis, a most thoughtful and supportive reader.

1 See "Some Water Colors by John Singer Sargent in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston," Art and Progress, October 1912; and [Jean Guiffrey], "The Water-Colors of Edward D. Boit and John S. Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, vol. 10 (June 1912), pp. 18-21. For a fuller discussion of the Sargent watercolors in the Brooklyn Museum, see Annette Blaugrund, "'Sunshine Captured': The Development and Dispersement of Sargent's Watercolors," in John Singer Sargent, ed. Patricia Hills (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 1987), pp. 224-225.

2 Exposition d'Art Americain (Association Franco-Americaine d'Expositions de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, 1923), p. 16.

3 Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York, 1986), p. 241.

4 "The Sargent I Knew," World Today, November 1927, quoted in Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent (New York, 1982), p. 237.

5 Sargent amid all his watercolor paraphernalia was said by Martin Birnbaum, a prominent art writer of the time, to resemble "a newly hatched chicken surrounded by broken egg-shells" (quoted in Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, drawings, watercolors [New York and Evanston, Illinois, 1970], p. 68).

6 See, for example, Forbes Watson ("John Singer Sargent," Arts, vol. 5 [March 1924], p. 150), who, while somewhat critical of the content of Sargent's watercolors, acknowledged that "his manual dexterity is supreme.

7 The Stones of Venice, (1851-1853; Mount Kisco, New York, 1989), p. 54. I am grateful to Erica Hirshler for this reference.

8 Transformations (London, 1926), quoted in Olson, John Singer Sargent, p. 236.

9 Sargent deliberately eschewed the picturesque. As he later wrote to his friend Henry Tonks (1862-1937), "As you know enormous views and huge skies do not tempt me" (quoted in Ormond, John Singer Sargent, p. 69).

10 Quoted in ibid., p. 76.

11 Letter to Evan Charteris quoted in Olson, John Singer Sargent, p. 239.

12 I am grateful to my colleagues Nicola J. Shilliam for information about Kashmir shawls and John J. Herrmann Jr. for his help with Tanagra figurines.