Move over Turkey (1879), there’s a new favorite Sargent I’d never seen nor heard of in town.
Maybe Turkey can be my favorite Sargent I’ve ever seen, and Two Octopi can be my favorite Sargent I haven’t.
Sargent, a student at the Beaux-Arts, was 19 when he painted Two Octopi, a scene from the deck of a fishing boat in Brittany. The first paintings Sargent showed and sold were seaside scenes from Brittany, but that wasn’t until 2-3 years later. This is Sargent’s only documented oil from 1875.
In “John Singer Sargent’s ‘Devils'”, a 2011 essay for Gastronomica: The Journal for Food and Culture, emily arensman pins down the limited sourcing (a letter to Charles Knoedler only known through a citation in a 1942 Parke-Bernet catalogue) and some context. Was this painting in Sargent and the Sea, a 2009 exhibition at the Corcoran [which traveled to the Royal Academy] of the artist’s early, little-known marine works?
Meanwhile, though the discussion and quotes are mostly references to eels, Alison Mairi Syme’s mention of Two Octopi in her 2010 book, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art, as a 19th-century queer-coded handshake, is now impossible to unconsider. And there was a fisherman involved in this picture, too.