John Singer Sargent ‘Abhorred’ Making His Lavish Portraits, So He Took Up Charcoal to Get the Job Done
John Singer Sargent ‘Abhorred’ Making His Lavish Portraits, So He Took Up Charcoal to Get the Job Done
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John Singer Sargent became one of the most sought-after artists at the turn of the last century. Commissions rose for his lavish oil portraits but, as he wrote to a friend in 1907, “I abhor and abjure them and hope to never do another, especially of the Upper Classes.”
So at the age of 51, he took early retirement from oil portraits, says the art historian and distant Sargent relative Richard Ormond—“which is an extraordinary thing for an artist to do at the height of his powers.”
The talented artist, who was born in Florence to American parents in 1856, trained in Paris and lived most his life in Europe, wanted to devote more time to landscapes, travel and completing the murals he began at the Boston Public Library. “He wanted the freedom to paint his own things,” says Ormond, a dapper Brit in pinstripes. “But he couldn’t escape entirely.”
To satisfy lingering commissions and delight his friends, Sargent made his portraits in charcoal—a medium that allowed completion in less than three hours rather than the weeks or months his full-length oil portraits took. The works on paper showed all the facility of the psychologically informed and carefully drafted oils, but with a dash of the spontaneity charcoal gave him.
Ormond, 81, the former director of the National Maritime Museum in London and deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery there, is a renowned authority on his great-uncle, having produced a comprehensive nine-volume survey of his paintings.
Once those were complete, “I decided to start in on the portrait charcoals, which are little known because they’re all scattered in private collections,” he says. “Museums that have rarely shown them, exhibitions occasionally include the odd one or two.” Yet there are about 750 in existence.
Ormond is guest curator of a new exhibition “John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.—the first such drawing show in more than 50 years. The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view 50 of the portraits, many that hadn’t ever been seen in public previously. “They come from private collections,” says the museum’s director Kim Sajet. “One of the most esteemed in fact being Queen Elizabeth herself from England. She’s lent a number of pictures.”
A private family picture was included—a 1923 profile of the Queen Mother, from the period when she was known as Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. “Sargent made the drawing the year she was married,” says Robyn Asleson, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings who helped to organize the show. “The crown didn’t know her brother-in-law would abdicate and she would become queen eventually.”
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