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.
[later in the day update]:
From the Juley Photos collection at the Smithsonian, we can see Sargent signed this work, titled simply Octopus, at least when the Juleys photographed it. The collector at the time was either a Connecticut painter or a Mayflower descendant, but perhaps not both.