John Singer Sargent: Painting Process, Pt. 2

"The Honourable Mrs. Charles Russell"
by J.S. Sargent

"At the beginning of a painting John Singer Sargent placed the head with a bit of charcoal, with no more than a few careful lines over which he passed a rag, so that it was on a perfectly clean greyish coloured canvas (which he preferred) faintly showing where the lines had been that he began to paint. 

At the start he used sparingly a little turpentine to rub in a general tone over the background and to outline the head (the real outline where the light and shadow meet, not the place where the head meets the background) - to indicate the mass of the hair and the tone of the dress. The features were not even suggested. This was a matter of a few moments. For the rest he used his colour without a medium of any kind, neither oil, turpentine or any admixture. 'The thicker you paint, the more your colour flows,' he explained. 

He had put in this general outline very rapidly, hardly more than smudges, but from the moment he that began really to paint, he worked with a kind of concentrated deliberation, a slow haste so to speak holding his brush poised in the air for an instant and then putting i just where and how he intended it to fall.

To watch the head develop from the start was like the sudden lifting of a blind in a dark room. Every stage was a revelation. For one thing he put his easel directly next to the sitter so that when he walked back from it he saw the canvas and the original in the same light, at the same distance, at the same angle of vision. He aimed at once for the true general tone of the background, of the hair and for the transition tone between the two. He showed me how the light flowed over the surface of the cheek into the background itself."

To be continued

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