John Singer Sargent: The Watercolors

This exhibition, John Singer Sargent the Watercolors, brings together two of the great collections of watercolors from the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. This exhibition unites these collections for the first time, and what's rather unique about it is that these collections were actually acquired from the artist himself. John Singer Sargent put together two groups of watercolors and sent them to exhibition at the prestigious Knoedler Gallery in New York in 1909 and 1912. Brooklyn Museum bought the first group, the 1909 exhibition, and then Museum of Fine Arts Boston bought the second in 1912. This exhibition is, as we're calling, sort of a once-in-a-generation opportunity because it is watercolors and watercolors are so fragile, so light-sensitive, the opportunity for these works to be on exhibit, especially all together, won't happen for a very, very long time again. And also I think it's a great opportunity for Houstonians to see Sargent watercolors. We haven't presented Sargent as a watercolorist before, so it's rather unique in that way too. Most people or most visitors in Houston know Sargent as the, you know, Gilded Age portraitist who depicted well-heeled Americans and British aristocrats at the turn of the century. This presents Sargent in a rather different light, really showing him as a modern artist or as an artist at the edge of the 20th century dealing with modern issues and grappling with those sort of things and not so much the 19th century portraitists we always think of him as. Sargent approached watercolor in a different way to some of his contemporaries, I would say, where many artists of this period still looked at watercolor and approached it as sort of scenes, often landscapes, seascapes, and that sort of thing, looking at it in much more sort of panoramic, scenic terms, broad views, for example, in Venice of the Grand Canal and all the architecture that went around it, where Sargent, especially in his scenes of, for example, Venice, looks at it much more in terms of sort of almost photographic, these cropped, very unconventional angles, very rarely taking on a grand scale or panoramic view. Often Sargent would approach a subject, whether it was an Italian villa gardens or Venice, at different angles, so he would kind of take multiple views of one particular building or one particular garden and it would be, for him, that the viewer needed to look at these things as a group, to kind of take in and absorb the entire group in order to get an understanding of what he was painting, but it wouldn't have necessarily been each individual part, it was more about the whole. By the turn of the century, Sargent had grown sort of bored or tired with commissioned portraiture. You know, you have to kind of think about this in terms of his career. He had been working on commissioned portraiture for 20 to 30 years by this time, and he wasn't getting as much sort of artistic inspiration or expression from that, and so for him, watercolor was a very personal thing. He was turning to exploring the medium and then he was also exploring subjects that meant something to him rather than to someone commissioning something, and so he felt that these were very personal. In fact, he never intended to sell them. He was keeping them for himself and most famously kept them in these stacks in his London studio on Tight Street to use maybe for later compositions, to give as gifts to friends, to give as wedding presents and that sort of thing. It's been famously said that in order to get one of these watercolors, you had to be a very close friend of Sargent, perhaps fall out of his gondola in helping him, or even get married to receive one as a wedding present. That's sort of how rare they were. There's this wonderful watercolor in the exhibition of Sargent's sister, Violet, resting, or we think she's resting. She at least seems to be resting and unaware that she's being observed, perhaps, and Sargent has captured her in this moment of complete relaxation, and what's beautiful about the picture when you get up close is that there's actually very little underdrawing. It's definitely an impression of the moment. He has used some pencil and graphite to outline the body itself, and then he's produced the watercolor, and then he's returned with graphite to delineate the nose, the mouth, the ears, and even some of the folds of the blouse, which make it quite beautiful. But when you look at sort of the exterior elements, if you look at the landscape and the vegetation, the brushwork is very sort of spare and abstract in a way, and I think you get that sense throughout the exhibition. There are elements of all of these pictures that strike you as quite modern in terms of this 19th century artist that you think you know so well, painting in a quite different way. Well, it's funny, when you look at this exhibition, it really could have been described as something like sunlight on stone. Sargent loves the play of light on multiple surfaces, especially white stones. You'll see throughout the exhibition, whether it's architecture in Venice or quarries in Italy, this idea of sort of play of light on stone, and it's quite interesting when you look at it because it's often a white surface, and if you look very closely, it's typically just the paper itself. He hasn't even painted that, and then the sun or the light, let's say, whether it's shadow or direct sunlight, is played across that surface in a variety of colors. He often uses lavenders and blues and tans and ochres and those sort of colors to kind of give it some animation, but you can see very clearly throughout, he loved that, and he was probably more interested in the play of light on a surface than what he was actually depicting. When you look at sculptures in many of the Italian villa scenes around the garden, the sculptures have very little definition. It's all about how light is hitting them. Houston is the third and final venue for this exhibition, and there's a number of reasons why the exhibition made sense for us. Houstonians, as we like to say, love and know John Singer Sargent. In fact, works by John Singer Sargent have been on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston since 1925, very early in our history. We have a number of works in our permanent collection, watercolor and oil by the artist, and then also we've presented a number of exhibitions either about John Singer Sargent or about his contemporaries. Our audiences know Sargent quite well. Also, outside of Boston and New York, Houston holds the largest number of John Singer Sargent works in private hands. So again, it's a familiar artist to us, and we're able to present him in a new light.