|
John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was the most
successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape
painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to
American parents. He studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris
under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.
In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism,
Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which
brilliantly referenced Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His
seemingly effortless facility for paraphrasing the masters in a
contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of
remarkable virtuosity (Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de Metz ; Mr. and
Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, 1897, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York). During his life his work engendered critical response from some
of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but
rather an adroit performer", and Walter Sickert published a satirical
turn under the heading "Sargentolatry". He was dismissed as an
anachronism at the time of his death, but appreciation of his art has
since grown steadily, especially following a retrospective exhibition at
the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986.
It has been suggested that the exotic qualities inherent in his work
appealed to the sympathies of the Jewish clients whom he painted from
the 1890s on. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait Almina,
Daughter of Asher Wertheimer (1908), in which the subject is seen
wearing a Persian costume, a pearl encrusted turban, and strumming an
Indian sarod, accoutrements all meant to convey sensuality and mystery.
If Sargent used this portrait to explore issues of sexuality and
identity, it seems to have met with the satisfaction of the subject's
father, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in London,
who commissioned from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his
family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron. The
paintings reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his
subjects. Wertheimer bequeathed most of the paintings to the National
Gallery.
|
