Word: sargents
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sargent later sold the portrait to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum.) In the furor, few seemed to care that Sargent had combined bare flesh and black velvet, starkness and stylishness, in an unforgettable image...
...Astonishing Picture." Sargent was born rich, the son of a Philadelphia expatriate in Europe, into a wondrously complacent world where no gentleman ever had to make his own bed. Traipsing from capital to capital with his parents and sisters, he grew into a sophisticated young man with a high collar beneath his full beard. He developed only one passion: painting, of the sort practiced long before by Frans Hals and Velasquez...
...Sargent learned the lessons of his chosen masters brilliantly and soon. It was in Paris, at a scant 27, that he proved himself a painter of felicity and not just flair. His Daughters of Edward D. Bolt (opposite) found a place at the Salon of 1883, and in the minds of men. One critic dis missed it instantly as "four corners and a void." Novelist Henry James was more discerning: "The naturalness of the composition," he wrote, "the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets...
Both in style and in mood the picture echoes Velasquez' huge masterpiece, The Maids of Honor, at the Prado. But where Velasquez firmly persuades the eye to believe in the painted image, Sargent only beguiles it into a momentary suspension of disbelief. And Velasquez' reverent handling of the way light falls on objects becomes mere virtuosity in Sargent. The fortuitous manner in which Sargent's light picks his flowerlike figures out of the gloom smacks more of the theater than of life. Yet when all this has been said, it is true that no painter alive today...
Paralyzing Paint. A year after his triumph with the Boit children, Sargent sent another painting to the Salon, which had a different sort of success. His subject was the reigning beauty of the hour, one Madame Gautreau (see cut). Sargent confided to a friend that Madame was "a uniform lavender or blotting-paper color all over," but justly added that she had "the most beautiful lines." He painted her with the accent on her low neckline and produced a succes de scandale...