John Singer Sargent: First Trip to America

"An Atlantic Storm" by J.S. Sargent

In 1876, John Singer Sargent sailed with Mrs. Sargent and Emily, his sister, for America. It was his first contact with the United States. He was an American by parentage, born and educated in the Old World, steeped in the culture of Europe, and now, at the age of twenty for the first time, he was introduced to his native country. 

Even in America, which was only for four months, the family continued to move, never omitting to see anything that had the least claim to interest. In that period they visited Philadelphia, Newport, Chicago, Saratoga, Niagara, Lake George, Quebec and Montreal, ending up with Washington and New York. It was the year of the Exhibition at Philadelphia, which coinciding with the the speeding up or large fortunes, did a great deal to start the fashion of collecting famous works of art. 

Sargent was entirely taken up with the examples of Japanese and Chinese art. It was just the moment when in Europe, and more especially in France, Oriental painting was influencing the modern school of artists.  Everywhere collectors were hunting for the works of Hokusai, Outamaro and Harunobu. Japanese artists were taken as models of reticence and economy in the statement of a fact, and as creating spatial atmosphere by means of a few lines. By the time Sargent was at work in Duran's studio the impulse from Japan had already passed into French painting, and its message had been extracted and absorbed. At the Philadelphia Exhibition he had before his eyes a further proof of what might be learnt from the East.

During his visit to America he seems to have done little painting. On the journey back across the Atlantic, during a storm in which their vessel was caught, he did a study of waves. This is one of the few occasions on which he took the sea as a subject for a picture, often though he painted water in fountains or lakes or canals. In his study of the Atlantic, the force and volume of the waves, the desolate iteration of crest and trough, and the dark anger of the storm are dramatically contrasted with the thin white track made on the waste of waters by the vessel and the frail platform from which the sketch is taken. It is a picture with distance, a thing comparatively rare in Sargent's landscapes."

To be continued

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