All oil paintings of John Singer Sargent (19 Century, American,
Impressionism) will be hand painted by our professional artists. Let HandmadePiece help you bring better museum quality art reproductions of John Singer Sargent to home. Photo preview of the finished art will be offered before delivery, global free shipping. View high-resolution
John Singer Sargent reproduction samples to check the replica quality HandmadePiece is able to provide.
1856-1925 • American • Painter • Aesthetic
"A knockdown insolence of talent." - Sargent
Born in Florence to wealthy, cultured American parents, Sargent spent his life in Europe as an expatriate; he was 20 years old before he even visited the United States. Probably because he painted the international elite with little of the reformist's social conscience, he is frequently marginalized as an artist lacking depth. An American art historian, Barbara Novak, has written that his reputation "will perhaps stabilize it self when he is excused for paintings like The Wyndham Sisters." That is an 1899 portrait of three elegant ladies ensconced-seeming even to float-in billows of opulence: silk and satin, brocade, and flowers. It is a very large canvas, more than 91 2 feet high and 7 wide, that portrays them in their drawing room, overseen by a full-length portrait of their mother, which is itself flanked by small, oval portrait heads: a family tree in full bloom . Providing an alternate point of view, the British critic FRY wrote, ''Since Sir Thomas LAWRENCE's time, no one has been able thus to seize the exact cachet of fashionable life, or to render it in paint with a smartness and piquancy which so exactly correspond to the social atmosphere itself. Such works must have an enduring interest to posterity simply as perfect records of the style and manners of a particular period." (Shortly after Sargent's death, however, Fry wrote a scathing and damaging review of the artist.) A third perspective was expressed in 1994 by Trevor Fairbrother, a Sargent biographer, who endeavored to contemporize appreciation of the artist by casting him in a homoerotic context "prudishly avoided by most scholars." Sargent actually ran afoul of a quite different sort of prudish manners in Paris when he painted a famous society beauty in a deep-cut black dress as Madame X (1884). One narrow, jeweled strap had slipped off her shoulder in the original version, but Sargent adjusted that by repainting it after the picture's scandalous debut. After that, and a subsequent decline of commissions, Sargent moved from Paris to London. When he was selling Madame X to the Metropolitan Museum of Art some 30 years later, Sargent wrote, "I suppose it is the best thing I have done." Besides portraits and wonderfully moody scenes of Venice and Algiers, Sargent worked in WATERCOLOR, in formal, experimental, and personal pictures that he called "snapshots" and "making the best of an emergency." These guarantee his standing as a watercolorist of the first order. It should be remarked that Sargent named VELAZQUEZ as a great inspiration.