John Singer Sargent: Have Easel, Will Travel

"White Ox at Siena" by John Singer Sargent

"In the summer of 1886 John Singer Sargent again visited his family, who were living at Gossensass. These visits meant no pause in Sargent's output of work. He would arrive at the station loaded with canvases and sketchbooks, bristling with the equipment for plein air sketching. No infatuated fisherman, arriving beside a chalk stream on a summer evening, could be more on the tiptoe of expectation than Sargent on these occasions. To the end of his days he had the supreme gift of being able to look forward, with the certainty of discovering excitement in new scenes and places. 

Few artists can have rejoiced as much in the exercise of their calling; certainly none can have practiced it with more singleness of purpose. But it was away from his portraits, on the canals of Venice or the plains of Palestine, in the passes of the high Alps or among the dancers of Spain, or the fountains and cypresses of Italy and the gardens of Sicily or on any one of the countless journeys that he made with friends, that his spirit was most at ease and serene - anywhere, in fact, where he could 'make the best of an emergency' as he called painting a watercolour. And an emergency was seldom wanting. 

Mrs. de Glehn recalls how on a hot day in Italy, having missed a connection at a junction, the party had to wait a considerable time. The rest of them had no thought but how to keep cool, but Sargent at once unpacked his easel and in the great heat he brought off one of his most brilliant studies of white oxen outside the station. This is a typical instance of his zeal, which coined even the accidents of life into opportunity."

To be continued

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