John Singer Sargent: Painting Process, Pt. 3

"Alice Vanderbilt Shepard"
by John Singer Sargent

"At first John Singer Sargent worked only for the middle tones, to model in larges planes, as he would have done had the head been an apple. In short, he painted as a sculptor models, for the great masses first, but with this difference that the sculptor can roughly lump in his head and cut it down afterwards, while the painter, by the limitations of his material, is bound to work instantly for an absolute precision of mass, in the colour and outline he intends to preserve. 

Economy of effort in every way, he preached, the sharpest self-control the fewest strokes possible to express a fact, the least slapping about of purposeless paint. He believed, with Carolus Duran, that painting was a science which it was necessary to acquire in order to make of it an art. 'You must draw with your brush,' he said, 'as readily, as unconsciously almost as you draw with your pencil.'

He advised doing a head for a portrait slightly under life-size to counteract the tendency to paint larger than life. Even so, he laid in a head slightly larger than he intended to leave it, so that he could model the edges with and into the background.

The hills of paint vanished from the palette yet there was no heaviness on the canvas; although the shadow was painted as heavily as the light, it retained its transparency. 'If you see a thing transparent, paint it transparent. Don't get the effect by a thin stain showing the canvas through. That's a mere trick. The more delicate the transition the more you must study it for the exact tone.'"

To be continued

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