The next painter in my blog series on “American art” is John Singer Sargent.

Wow.  What a painter.  He could handle paint and create compositions as well as any artist from any country from any time period since oil paint was developed c. 1450.

Now that’s a big statement and I know it.  I am going to illustrate his mastery  with more of his work below.

For starters, allow your eye to get lost in the facile handling of pigment with long stokes of the brush in this detail:

Keeping in mind that this work is actually just a collection of colors on a flat canvas, you start to understand his mastery.

After you have studied the detail, you want to go back to the whole composition, so here it is:

Wouldn’t you love to talk to this woman and find out:  what time of day is it and is she ready to go out or has she just returned home?  Is she tired, is she bored, has she been jilted, has she jilted someone else?  These would just be my starting questions.

Her long, flowing hair let down around her shoulders may be a clue.  I’d assume that if she were about to go out her hair would be up.  Just a guess, though.

For drama, you cannot top Sargent.  Check out the controlled energy in the figure of this gorgeous dancer and the intense concentration of her accompanying musicians.

So yes, he could paint exotic subject matter.  But he could also create unforgettable images of home life.  I love the title of this work, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, almost as much as I love the painting itself.

This stunning portrait, which today is known as Madame X and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created a big stir.  In the woman’s hauteur and her nonchalant exposure of bare flesh, the painting was very unorthodox.

Here’s a great photograph of Sargent in his studio with the painting.

And, although Sargent knocks me out with his oil paintings, I doubt very much that there has ever been a watercolorist who could top his handling of this unforgiving medium.  It doesn’t hurt that his subject matter in watercolor is often street or water scenes of Venice.

So, back to the same old question:  what is American about American art?  The answer becomes increasingly irrelevant as the physical world became much smaller–as travel and communications expanded– in the late 19th-century.  Sargent, like Cassatt and Whistler in discussed in earlier posts, was born in the United States and had many patrons here.  Other than that, he was a cosmopolitan man of the world, and painting among the best of them.

Ciao for today.