John Singer Sargent: Hard Working Student

"William Butler Yeats" by J.S. Sargent

"At eighteen years of age John Singer Sargent was still slight in build, a little shy and awkward in manner, reserved (as he remained throughout his life) in conversation, but charming, fresh, unsophisticated and even idealistic in his outlook on the world, engagingly modest and diffident, speaking perfect French, hardly aware yet of his gifts, and bound by a devotion to his sister Emily and his parents. All testimony agrees. And so he crosses the threshold of his career.

From the first he was a worker of astonishing capacity. He would breakfast every morning with his sister Emily at seven so as to arrive at the studio before eight, and on Mondays in order to secure a good place for the week he would start earlier. At five o'clock in the evening he would leave the studio and go to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he remained until seven. Dinner over, he would go to the studio of Bonnat and attend a class which lasted from eight to ten at night. On Sundays he worked at home, dining with his family and bringing fellow-students into the radius of that encouraging milieu. Among these were Caroll Beckwith, Frank Fowler, Russell, Edelfeldt the Finnish painter and Alden Weir. With all this he found time for music and for reading.

He was rarely to be seen except in the Latin Quarter. He was immersed in his work. Paul Helleu, then a fellow-students, remembers him as always dressed with distinctive care in a world which still affected the baggy corduroy trousers tight at the ankle, the slouch hats or tam o'shanters, and the coloured sashes associated with the Latin Quarter. He was a striking figure as he strode down the Rue Bonaparte to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and already a little noted and recognized as one of the very few whose future could be looked on as definitely assured."

To be continued

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