I’m here at Dulwich Picture Gallery to view an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s watercolours
The first time there has been a comprehensive exhibition of those paintings in almost 100 years.
The exhibition begins with his little studies of architectural fragments
but then it moves thematically through cities, Venice, landscapes and figures.
As a watercolour artist myself and, as a great lover of Venice,
I’m very keen to take some lessons from what Sargent was able to achieve when he was painting in Venice
and this is one particularly striking example; "On the Zattere".
There are few paintings that Sargent did in Venice which make me want to travel there more than this image.
It’s unfinished, it’s an unbalanced composition
and yet, in its state, it communicates to me all the things that make Venice a wonderful subject for artists.
That feeling of the interaction of sunlight, water and extraordinary architecture,
picking up all the reflections from the canal.
This image absolutely glows, just like an evening in Venice and the reason that it does that is because
Sargent was so sophisticated in the way he painted.
He washed his colour across the page, he never overworked it.
He allowed the luminescence of the paper underneath to come shining through
and to make us feel that this is a fleeting, transient moment in time that we can still share in.
Now Sargent didn’t just paint in Venice and in urban environments,
he also loved to be out en plein air, in the landscape
and there’s one particular watercolour that I love which is painted in a place called "San Vigilio".
Sargent used his watercolours to really rediscover the joy of paint
and that’s what we see here, an artist unleashed, painting simply for the pleasure of it.
The whole painting is imbued with a sense of immediacy.
He has rushed across the image with a heavily laden brush of watercolour
and he hasn’t even allowed certain areas of the paint to dry
before he’s reapplied paint on top of that first layer
which means that here, where you might just think this is an accidental bloom of paint, of brown on top of gold
he’s very intentionally suggested to our imagination
that maybe this is the shadow of a branch behind our heads, waving in the breeze.
That’s what the blur’s about. To achieve that you have to be technically expert, that’s no accident.
This image could be turned upside down and it would still be a thrill to look at.
A wonderful abstract exchange of colour, brushwork and pattern. It’s beautiful.
This is an image of a landscape detail and that was the favourite subject for Sargent.
Apparently he wasn’t too keen on painting panoramas but when he had the opportunity, boy, could he do that well too.
This is an image of an alpine landscape.
Sargent has revealed to us in this painting that he was a master technician.
He’s concentrated all of his detail on this emerald, diagonal forest
which crosses the middle distance of the painting but in the foreground and the background, there’s hardly any detail at all.
In fact, much of the paper is exposed and allowed to show through
and what that does is create a tension between the foreground, where your eye begins
and, travelling across all of this detailed forest into the distance, we get a sense of space.
To achieve that is enormously hard because it means you have to paint quickly and with confidence
and Sargent was more than capable of doing that.
In this moment he has seized the illumination of the sun coming out from behind the clouds,
striking across the mountains and giving us a journey into space.
Sargent was, of course, renowned for being a portrait painter and here, in the last room in the exhibition,
we find him using watercolour to paint figures.
This is “Lady with an Umbrella” and in fact the subject was one of his nieces.
Captured, I believe, whilst they were on an alpine stroll
but you wouldn’t think that because it is an image of such seductive intensity,
your imagination is transported to all other kinds of possibilities.
Sargent is able to evoke that quality of elegance and sensuousness mainly through his composition.
He has cropped the figure very tightly so that so much of her dress is actually billowing out of the picture frame
which means that right away we are zooming into the image with our eyes
and we follow the elegant inverted "S" shape of her body
which leads us across her legs, through her hips, up her body towards her beautiful face,
which is the only area in the painting that Sargent has concentrated the detail.
In this image, about two thirds of it is actually a mere abstract exploration of what paint can do.
The patterns, the colours, interacting across one another to tell us that this is a mass of fabric
but even if we didn’t know that it’s still fascinating
and that of course is because Sargent was, well, just such a pure artist.
The pleasure of painting was something that he indulged himself in and allows us to enjoy on his behalf.
In this painting, it’s all about sensuous pleasure.
In many of his other works, it was something more dramatic that he was after
and in this watercolour of a figure in a gondola there’s a complete change in tone.
Now Venice could be colourful and luminescent but it could also be moody and dramatic and that’s exactly what this painting is all about.
Sargent is a young, 25 year old artist, willing to take risks
from the extreme, dramatic composition
to the isolation of this figure picked out in dark indigos and blues against a fluid backdrop of misty ochres
and this particular scrubble of paint in the bottom left hand corner that I love which simply energises the whole image.
Sargent was often criticised for telling you too much. In this painting, he’s told us just enough
and he allows us to weave our own narrative around the mystery of this woman in black.
Many of these images were never really intended for exhibition
and it’s actually a great privilege to be able to look through this artist’s sketchbook to see him painting with freedom and with joy
and I really do urge you to come and have a look at Sargent’s watercolours which are on display until the 8th October.