John Singer Sargent: Decision to be an Artist

"On His Holidays, Norway" by J.S. Sargent

"The winter of 1868-69 was spent by the Sargents in Rome, and here the momentous decision was made as to John Singer Sargent's future. Every day that passed had emphasized his affinity with art. In Rome a German-American landscape painter, Carl Welsch, long since forgotten, took an interest in the boy and noted his aptitude for drawing. He invited him to come and work in his studio, and Sargent used to spend the mornings in copying the watercolors of Welsch. Those who frequented the society of the Sargents also recognized that the boy possessed a talent of no ordinary quality. The recognition became vocal. It was supported by his mother and reluctantly admitted by his father. 

Sargent was at this time tall for his thirteen years, slim of form, warm in colour, his hair dark, a look of alacrity and welcome in his eyes, a gait that was brisk and decided, and spirits that broke lightly into laughter. He was already an indomitable worker, with a disposition mellow with kindliness and goodwill. If he was sometimes imposed on, and if his good nature sometimes seemed to warrant aggression, this could never be carried far. He had a hot temper, a reserve of pugnacity, which was not so deep down that it could not be roused.

He was now specifically pledged to the profession of an artist, was busy in and out of season with his pencil - observing and noting before getting to work, crouching over his sketch, then lifting his head and holding up the drawing the better to criticize. The drawings were precocious, not in imagination, but as literal records of what was immediately before him. He drew whatever came to hand, never worrying to find special subjects, but just enjoying the sheer fun of translating on to paper the record of what he saw: the shadow of an oleander on a wall, the attitude of a fellow traveller in a railway carriage, the bronze figures around the tomb of Maximilian at Innsbruck.

Mrs. Sargent pressed on with the artistic education of her son. He was entered as a student from the life at the Academia delle Belle Arti, where he quickly asserted his superiority and gained the annual prize. During the springtime, when not engaged in his classes, he would set out with his mother to sketch in the neighborhood, in the Boboli Gardens, or in the Poderi of Fiesole, or among the valleys and slopes that curl and tumble from the mountains to the plain, or among the olives and cypresses at their feet."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)