A Master Study of SARGENT's Lady Agnew

Hello and welcome to this John Singer Sargent Master Study Tutorial. Of course, the image that we're going to be working with today is John Singer Sargent's portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochner. It's arguably one of his most well-known portraits. We're going to start out this master copy by doing a block-in in graphite on this canvas that I have in front of me here. The reason that we're going to do this is because it's very important to attain the proportions and design of the portrait that we're going to make before we actually get into oil paint and color because by the time we're there, we're going to want to give 100% of our attention to the incredibly subtle shifts in hue, value, and chroma that we notice in Sargent's portrait. Basically, we want to go from the simplest possible expression of the subject into later finding something more specific. The later in this case is really going to be once we paint it. I don't think really at any point what I'm working on here in this drawing is going to become necessarily a portrait of Lady Agnew. It's going to be a placement of features and I'm going to save the articulation of those features and the design of subtle aspects like the curve at the corner of the mouth or something. I'm going to save that for when I'm painting. What I want you to recall when you're working on your projects in your studio is this. The basic proportions need to be derived from this moment. So, ask yourself, what is the distance from the top of the head to the hairline and how many of those distances fit into the face that we're seeing? Then, how many of those distances fit into the width of the face that we're seeing? This is the basic hunt for proportions that's going to get you to a place where your block-in has a believable likeness that doesn't have all the bells and whistles and specificity that the final painting has, but it has that, you know, 30 meters away kind of accuracy that we need to have at this stage in order to progress. A great place to start out when we're going to get into a painting where we have like this white canvas that we have to contend with is to talk about something called local color and or local value. So, we're talking about what is the local color value of the entire light shape or let's say, let's split it up into two that we have the brighter planes and the slightly darker planes. What is the local color value, for instance, of the shadow that encompasses the shadow in the background and shadow on the couch here? You know, what is the local color of her kind of dress overall? If you choose these color values well, what should happen eventually is that when we go to paint this, we have a really great base that is overall kind of harmonious, right? And so, we'll have a much greater opportunity, I think, to capture with a lot of clarity the color harmonies within the painting itself will be kind of diverging out from a kind of fixed place instead of diverging out completely, you know, from zero. This is kind of that search for color values, right? Trying to really create a mosaic of color values that are conducive to the overall sense of the picture. Now, I want to get into the shadow colors on the side of her cheek here, such a light shadow. I mean, for somebody that's used to like painting in a studio environment, you know, the value of that shadow, it's like, I mean, it's like a mid-tone in most studio paintings. And the lips, I'm just going to paint as one like kind of flat shape. I'm not really going to get into the differentiation in between them, kind of gets this good big shape for them. Remember that when something is high key, that means that it can't be really affected so much by colored pigments. Think about how, what the value of this is, right? This is like a value one. Here, this is like a value four. If we took a black and white picture of this, you know, this is maybe a value three. These are quite a bit darker than what that is. So, the more of these that I add into the white, the darker that mixture is going to get. So, in order to kind of preserve the brightness of the forehead, I can't add too many colored pigments to it. It is the hairline that I use to kind of refer all of my students to like how hairlines look in painting. They look soft. I mean, that's the bottom line, you know, that is not a crisp hairline. It's gone to great lengths to ensure that we feel the skull and we feel the skin going in under the hair, right? And he's left you these kind of sharper edges out of the contour of the head here. Brilliant. So, here, the dead coloring layer, the underpainting, right, is done. We're going to let this dry completely and then go in and actually have just a finishing layer. So, we're going to repaint everything on here. We're going to add in other color notes like you see, like the warmer temperatures and the patterning on the cloth. We're going to be adding that in. Of course, the look in the eyes is going to be massively amplified by the amount of value variance that we're going to create in there. A lot of contrast that isn't present today. That's just because we wanted to lay a base, get ready for when the painting is ready to finish. This is going to be the most labor-intensive section of this entire lesson and so I want to preserve all the time possible for the work that we're going to have to do to get this from where it is now to the conclusion, which should be a relatively accurate representation of the original portrait. The first thing I want to do is re-establish the major planes and color value shapes of the portrait. Since, of course, it's a portrait painting, I'm going to start with trying to find some of the shadow values within the face. All of this is going to be brush mixed and I'm just going to go for a nice warm reddish mixture. There's going to be quite a bit of white, actually, inside of this shadow. Remember, the shadow on her face is really, really filled with ambient light. When we compare it, for instance, to the black of the hair here, we see a pretty massive value jump in between the two. Now, be aware that while you're painting in this first section, it's going to look crude. It's not going to look beautiful and harmonious like you would like it to. We should block in the entire face like a mosaic of color value tiles and then begin to find and search out the color values that fused those two tiles next to each other. So, for this, I'm going to lay in a lot of kind of broad color and worry about the modeling and the fusing of brush strokes a little bit later. Now, here and here, there's a pretty clear hue shift that takes place. So, we shift to a more yellow-orange as we get below the chin. We're almost blocked in in terms of the entire face. I want to get to the eyes in a moment. Now, what is the biggest mistake that you can make with the eyes that everybody makes with the eyes? The white of the eyes is not white. You cannot just take your white and paint in the whites of the eyes. The eyeball itself is a sphere. It is an orb. It is affected by the light. So, the further we get to the right-hand side, the darker it will be. But even the left-hand side will have the half shade of the eyelashes and even the shade of the eye socket on it. In general, remember, it's just darker than you think. At the moment, we're going to shift gears. And from this point onward, as I add things, as I work on areas, I'm going to be considering finishing. I'm going to think about the kinds of transitions that I want, the kinds of forms that I want to create, the merging of some of these tiles of color value. It may not be perfect at this point, but I'm just saying that that will now enter my mentality. Now, with oil paint, making a transition essentially means painting a color value in between two others. That is what I'm up to now, working on what the color values in between the other color values should be. Now, if you choose them well, what should happen is that the transition immediately starts to make itself apparent. Remember with Lady Agnew, something that is so apparent, yet a bit easy to forget, there's this massive asymmetry in her eyes. It's almost, I don't want to say it's disconcerting, but once you start to notice it, it's hard to unsee it. And so, like for me, looking at the face right now, you know, I get this feeling like, oh, wait a minute, something about my drawing is off because I've got her eyes, you know, so asymmetrical. I'm really not used to that. But here, I got to trust my observation. I know that I saw it that way. I know that it is that way. Just got to stick to it and don't overcorrect. Now, what I'm interested in here also is the chroma level at these transitional areas, especially just through here. You can see Sargent with a couple of brush strokes trying to indicate the warmth of that turning edge with some, let's say, possibly underrated brush strokes there. Some lovely cool temperatures underneath the lips. I always wondered about those. Seems very cool indeed. Was it Sargent amplifying them a little bit to bring some of the warmer temperature out of the lips themselves? Was it ambient light filling that area that caused it to have? I don't know, obviously. But nonetheless, it leaves behind this impression. Very cool temperature popping in there. Something else at the outside corners of the mouth. It's going to be a turn inward. Easy to overlook. But if you do, you usually wind up with a mouth that, for whatever reason, seems very flat. As I say that, you can imagine it's not what we're looking for. That upper lip actually carries quite a bit of reflected light to indicate the need for a very slightly diminished chroma. Now, there is so much expression in this area of the portrait, in this model in particular. Obviously, the highlight on the nose gets all the attention. But in reality, you know, I think the mouth and these outside corners really have just as much to say about her character. Let's go ahead and dot the eyes, so to speak. Something very easy to overdo. That highlight on the lower lip as well is always going to be one that will haunt you. I feel like part of it maybe is that we're beholden to how good this portrait actually is. That we are forced to always try to create something in response to it that is also so good. Okay, let's spend a moment with this background. I won't say that I'm done with the features of the face, but not far off, there will be one more pass on them. And likely, that's where I'll leave it. But I want to do a few things in the background. Notably, there's a couple areas where the figure is meeting the background. I want to see a little bit more clearly part of the tapestry or chair behind her. By this point, you know, we have really figured out what our range of color and value are. So shouldn't be a lot of fear and making a few changes right towards the end to the shape of a highlight or something like that. This is the time when we're putting the things onto the painting, which hopefully, hopefully really bring it home, make it special. There's something you can take out of this. And I hope that there's a lot. If you remember one thing from studying Sargent, painting this particular project, closeness, tightness, the value organization in this is absolutely remarkable. So many places where I would have taken a choice that would have over modeled the form, would have left behind maybe a garish kind of difference in value that while it might make things seem a little bit more round, might not improve necessarily the overall sense of harmony in the painting. Sargent always opted for harmony. So at moments like these, it's important to wrap up the experience to understand the journey that we went on, the things that we learned, what we grasped, what we missed. And with that in mind, I just want to point out, I literally did not notice the highlight at the very tip of the nose, not the one on the bridge of the nose, but the one on the tip of the nose did not notice it there. Didn't even know of its existence until just a moment ago when I painted it in. I was taking my final look at my source image, trying to see what have I got? What am I left with? What did I miss? And here's this little highlight that pops out. And I think there's a good analogy for this kind of lesson inside of that experience. We always think that we know an artist from the time we've spent at the museum or flipping through a book of theirs. There is no deeper, clearer way to study a painting that we love and to understand the things about it that makes it really resonate with us than to spend hours and hours and hours. We've spent probably a total of at least eight hours looking deeply into this painting. There's no better way than that to understand the merits or the components that a painting has that make it come alive for you. And for art students, you can't get any better than that kind of conscious awakening, right? Which will allow you, hopefully, to take those lessons into your paintings. What did you love about Sargent? What did you love about Lady Agnew? And what are you going to take with you and put into your next portrait?