John Singer Sargent: Teaching at the Royal Academy

"Kenneth Grahame" by J.S. Sargent

"The following extracts from Mr. Haley's account of John Singer Sargent's teaching at the Royal Academy Schools, 1897-1900, throw further light on his method:

'The Significance of his teaching was not always immediately apparent. It had the virtue of revealing itself with riper experience. His hesitation was probably due to a searching out for something to grasp in the mind of the student. That achieved, he would unfold a deep earnestness, subdued but intense. He was regarded by some students as an indifferent teacher, by others as a wonder. As a wonder I like to regard him.

He dealt always with the fundamentals. Many were fogged as to his aim. These fundamentals had to be constantly exercised and applied.

'When drawing from the model,' he said, 'never be without the plumb line in the left hand' - everyone has a bias, either to the right hand or the left of the vertical. The use of the plumb line rectifies this error and develops a keen appreciation of the vertical.

He then took up the charcoal, with arm extended it its full length, and head thrown well back; all the while intensely calculating, he slowly and deliberately mapped the proportions of the large masses of a head and shoulders, first the poise of the head upon the neck, its relation with the shoulders. Then rapidly indicate the mass of the hair, then spots locating the exact position of the features, at the same time noting their tone values and special character, finally adding any further accent or dark shadow which made up the head, the neck, the shoulders and head of the sternum.

After his departure I immediately plumbed those points before any movement took place of the model and found them very accurate. A formula of his for drawing was 'Get your spots in their right place and your lines precisely at their relative angles.'"

To be continued

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