Tom Jeffreys reviews Sargent and the Sea, in which the Royal Academy shines a light on a previously overlooked aspect of the work of John Singer Sargent.
It's funny how artistic reputations ebb and flow. John Singer Sargent was probably the pre-eminent portrait painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a prolific, technically brilliant artist, adept at depicting wealth, beauty and status. Yet he was roundly dismissed by figures as eminent as Pissarro, Sickert, and Roger Fry – one assumes he wasn't gritty enough for their particular tastes. Warhol loved him though, and his star is clearly on the ascendancy again, which is always nice to see.
Sargent and the Sea is one of those exhibitions that the Royal Academy excels at – manageable in size and scope, precise, perhaps a little bit dry and academic, but informative and with a reassuring feeling of focus and direction. They know what they're trying to do. And what they're trying to do is show that, whilst Sargent may be best known for his portraiture, there is also another side to his oeuvre that is often overlooked. And that is, as the title suggests, the sea.
Things kick off in traditional – and slightly muted – fashion, with a room of youthful sketches and family photographs that set the pace and chronology of the exhibition. It's interesting, but not massively so. The next room, though, is a cracker. The works on show here concentrate on evocative depictions of the sea itself: there's no land, very few people, only the odd dark vessel – solitary and vulnerable. This is about the sea in all its various incarnations, and about a young painter's virtuoso ability to capture it: calm and broad and gently undulating in Atlantic Sunset; a pine-forested mountain ridge in Atlantic Storm; and, in The Derelict, a rippling, muscled, quietly threatening presence. There's a comparison made with JMW Turner, but Sargent is less concerned with the sublimely colossal than with more subtle variations of texture and rhythm. The drama here lies latent.
From here the exhibition neatly charts Sargent's impressive virtuosity – the sheer breadth of moods, styles and techniques really is quite something. In Capri it's all naked pink-faced cherubs and turquoise shallows (a little saccharine for my liking); in Venice there's a bouncing kind of energy to his bright, bustling watercolours; in the little fishing village of Cancale in Brittany, his work is at a kind of crossroads between formalism and realism, grandeur and poverty (neatly encapsulated by the phrase “well scrubbed peasants” in the accompanying text); Whitby, appropriately, is bleak, bare and tobacco brown.
My favourite room, after Atlantic Voyages, is, I think, Sargent the Draughtsman. Here one gets an insight into what really seems to interest the artist. These sketches, studies and carefully detailed drawings depict all the technical apparatus of maritime life. Oars, sails, rigging, anchors, tackle on spar (whatever that is): all are masterfully studied – the workings of a complex micro-culture as viewed by an analytical eye.
And so you can perhaps understand the objections made against Sargent. Historian and critic Lewis Mumford wrote that “Sargent remained to the end an illustrator…the most adroit appearance of workmanship, the most dashing eye for effect, cannot conceal the essential emptiness of Sargent’s mind”. This is something the Royal Academy tries a little half-heartedly to address by pointing out his that Sargent painted “ordinary” crew, not wealthy passengers and implying that the high formalism of En Route Pour la Pêche was simply to please the stuffy Paris Salon.
But they needn't have worried too much, because what Mumford fails to realise is that detachment does not necessarily mean emptiness. Art may be analytical as well as emotive – just look at Virgil or Pope or Keith Tyson. And besides, to criticise an artist for his politics (or lack thereof) is like criticising a politician for his haircut – it rather misses the point. Sargent is brilliant, and by opening our eyes to a hitherto overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, Sargent and the Sea makes this crystal clear.
Sargent and the Sea is at the Royal Academy from 10th July to 26th September 2010.
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Photo credits (from top to bottom):
John Singer Sargent
En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878
Oil on canvas
78.8 x 122.8 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund 17.2
John Singer Sargent
Atlantic Storm, 1876
Oil on canvas
58.5 x 81.5 cm
Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis
This exhibition has been organised by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts.
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