Exhibit of the week: Sargent and the Sea

Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.

Through Jan. 3, 2010

The expatriate American John Singer Sargent may have been “the premier portrait painter of the Gilded Age,” said Chris Klimek in the Washington Examiner. He reached the apogee of his fame and skill toward the close of the 19th century, and at the Corcoran’s current exhibit you can examine such early masterpieces of portraiture as Marie Buloz Pailleron (1879) and Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (1883). But mostly what you’ll find is example after example of the “striking” seascapes the artist created as a young man. Years before Sargent made high society his subject, his chief interest was the sea. The Corcoran’s own prized Setting Out to Fish (1878) “serves as a kind of anchor” to a show filled with the beaches, ships, and leisure-seekers of France’s northern coast. One sketch for Fishing for Oysters at Cancale (1878) hasn’t been exhibited for almost 70 years.

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It must be understood that most of the 80 paintings here are apprentice work, hardly among the artist’s best, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. “If he had died after making these works, he’d barely be a footnote in the history of his art.” There’s nothing technically wrong with the boldly rendered watercolor and oil paintings of fishermen laboring and fashionable folk loitering. It’s just that they’re “more than a bit Victorian and sentimental.” Though these scenes may seem to have been painted from life, they were actually composed in his studio, and it shows. The one thing that makes most of these works seem vital is Sargent’s rendering of the waves themselves. “The white paint that the artist slathers onto them” creates thrilling effects of a roiling and out-of-control nature, which contrasts sharply with the staid, picturesque scenes.

It’s difficult today to appreciate how truly innovative Sargent’s expressive brushwork was, said Barrymore Laurence Scherer in The Wall Street Journal. These days we associate this look primarily with the impressionists, but Sargent began his career before most of those painters had gained fame. Sargent’s early style, “balancing impressionist freedom and academic discipline,” actually reflects a then-current French style known as juste milieu, or golden mean. Even so, the young artist quickly broke free of any particular movement. Watch how his brush defines a form, or creates a sensual feel of skin, sand, and sunburn with a few decisive strokes, and it’s clear he was a prodigy who “effectively achieved his mature style out of the gate.”