John Singer Sargent: Painting Prices

John Singer Sargent working en plein air

"Though John Singer Sargent left a considerable fortune, there is little doubt that he could have doubled or trebled it. Money was a part of the machinery of life in which he took very little interest. His charges for portraits varied considerably. 

• For the 'Vickers' group (1884), he received 400 pounds; the 'Ladies Acheson' group (1901), 2,100 pounds; for the 'Baltimore Doctors' (1906), 3,000 pounds; for the 'Marlborough' group (1906), 2,500 guineas. 
• For full-lengths he received 1,000 guineas. 
• For lesser pictures prices varying from 500 pounds to 800. 
• During the War for two pictures, one of 'President Wilson,' the other of 'Mrs. Duxbury,' painted for the British Red Cross, he received 10,000 pounds each and to that extent enriched the funds of the society. 
• For oil landscapes he asked prices varying from 100 to 500 pounds. 
• For watercolours seldom more than 50 pounds. For eighty-three watercolours sold to an American museum in 1909 he received 4,000 pounds. 
• For charcoal portraits he charged at first 21 guineas, which price was gradually increased till in 1923 he began charging 100 guineas.

With regard to his drawings he wrote to Lady Lewis: 'I never know what to ask for a mere snapshot especially, if it does not happen to be a miraculously lucky one. It was with the utmost reluctance that he could be induced for the purpose of sale, to pull out any one of the watercolours which used to lie in their frames, jammed one against the other in a large rack on the floor of his studio. If in response to insistence he acquiesced, he would produce one or two, always with a good deal of gutteral protest, pointing out what he considered their drawbacks, and qualifying them with some derogatory title: 'Vegetables,' 'Dried Seaweed,' 'Troglodytes of the Cordilleras,' 'Blokes,' 'Idiots of the Mountains' and 'Intertwingles."

To be continued

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