The Illusion of Ease

I want to take a moment to address the illusion of ease in painting and the difficulty with which an artist obtains it.

Below is a portrait of Mrs. Hugh Hammersley by John Singer Sargent...

I am a great admirer of Sargent and the apparent ease of his brushwork but it had never occurred to me that such ease was not a gift given upon reaching some level of skill where one can call themselves master. No, this ease was achieved by fighting tooth and nail with the canvas, demolishing all work that had been done before to start anew if just the slightest detail or shift of posture was not befitting the sitter.

Sargent would often repaint the heads of his sitters dozens of times. Each one from scratch. He would not reposition features or tinker with the details of a face as this meant the initial structure was wrong and had to be redone.The head of Mrs. Hammersley above was repainted no less than 16 times.

He painted his forms as a sculptor models his, laying in the broad forms first and letting the features blossom from within. They were never a separate thing to be applied to the face, they were always integral, from the very first stroke.

No matter how long he worked on a particular piece he had no qualms about destroying everything to start fresh if it was not to his satisfaction. Below is a portrait of Lady D'Abernon. After three weeks of painting her in a white dress, Sargent scraped out the painting at what would have been the last sitting. He then repainted her in a black dress in only three.

Sargent's paintings appear as if he completed them on a whim and that they flew from his brush with the littlest effort. He was able to achieve this because the images did in fact fly from his brush, though what you cannot see and must respect is the time spent behind those few remaining strokes on the canvas. The fact that countless hours were spent simplifying and perfecting the image in his mind's eye through painting and repainting until the perfect visualization of a form can pour out at once and create what we all see as a masterpiece done with ease.

References: I found the information in this post from the accounts of Sargent's process and methods by some of his students, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley. A collected PDF of these compiled notes can be found on Craig Mullins' site here.

From Color to Sound

The following was taken from an account of a sitter being painted by John Singer Sargent in 1902:

My husband came several times to the sittings. On one occasion Mr. Sargent sent for him specially. He rode across the Park to Tite Street. He found Mr. Sargent in a depressed mood. The opals baffled him. He said he couldn't paint them. They had been a nightmare to him, he declared, throughout the painting of the portrait. That morning he was certainly in despair.

Presently he said to my husband: "Let's play a Fauré duet." They played, Mr. Sargent thumping out the bass with strong, stumpy fingers. At the conclusion Mr. Sargent jumped up briskly, went back to the portrait and with a few quick strokes, dabbed in the opals. He called to my husband to come and look: "I've done the damned thing," he laughed under his breath.

What appeared to interest him more than anything else when I arrived was to know what music I had brought with me. To turn from color to sound evidently refreshed him, and presumably the one art stimulated the other in his brain.

References: I found the information in this post from the accounts of Sargent's process and methods by some of his students, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley. A collected PDF of these compiled notes can be found on Craig Mullins' site here.

Faithful Portraiture

Below is an excerpt from some notes on John Singer Sargent. They have been compiled from a multitude of sources and can be found at Craig Mullins' site here.

It was a common experience for Sargent, as probably for all portrait painters, to be asked to alter some feature in a face, generally the mouth. Indeed, this happened so often that he used to define a portrait as "a likeness in which there was something wrong about the mouth." He rarely acceded, and then only when he was already convinced that it was wrong. In the case of Francis Jenkinson, the Cambridge Librarian (painting below), it was pointed out that he had omitted many lines and wrinkles which ought to be shown on the model's face. Sargent refused to make, he said, "a railway system of him."

While it is true that Sargent would almost never change his subjects features at their request he did exaggerate those features required for the most faithful likeness. In this way he certainly did not paint exactly what he saw but rather captured the essence of his sitter.

Below is the compared photograph and portrait of Coventry Patmore. The portrait having been done from life (not from the photograph) both dated to the mid 1890's.

Patmore thought very highly of Sargent having wrote of him: 

“He seems to me to be the greatest, not only of living English portrait painters, but of all English portrait painters; and to be thus invited to sit to him for my picture is among the most signal honours I have ever received.”

He was so impressed by the likeness that he wrote of the painting: 

"It is now finished to the satisfaction, and far more than the satisfaction of every one - including the painter - who has seen it. It will be simply, as a work of art, THE painting of the Academy."