Tag: john singer sargent

John Singer Sargent made these two vertiginous paintings of orchestra rehearsals in the Cirque d’Hiver when he was in his early 20s. The wild grisaille one at the MFA Boston, tighter, and without the lounging clowns, is thought to be influenced by a similar monochrome rehearsal study by Degas, whose work Sargent knew.

The extended text at the MFA Boston makes it sound like Sargent whipped out a canvas in the middle of rehearsal and just started painting. It does look that way, though the Art Institute canvas is almost a meter tall. They’re both at the Met rn for the Sargent in Paris show.

While looking for John Singer Sargent’s entangled octopus painting at the Smithsonian’s vast Photography Study Collection, I could not help but notice this painting he made of a dog. I really, really am not a dog painting guy, but apparently I am dog painted in Paris by one of two artists. Or three. Okay four, max.

Pointy was the dog of Louise and Valerie Burckhardt, the daughters of Swiss-American friends of the Sargent family, and Pointy (1881) is one of at least three works young Sargent made as a gift for the family. [It says “to my friend Louise” on the back.]

Make that four works. Sargent’s full-length portrait of Louise Burckhardt was a hit at the Salon of 1882. Sargent inscribed it, “to my friend Mrs. Burckhardt”. If auction lot texts are to be believed, Mrs Burckhardt was trying to spark a romance between the painter and his subject. Or maybe we only know this story because someone in Sargent’s publicity department told it. He never married because he was so dedicated to his work, insisted the family members and academics gatekeeping his CR.

Anyway, auction texts. The Burckhardts kept Pointy until 1991, when they sold it at Sotheby’s, and then it sold again in 2007 at Christie’s in an auction literally titled, “The Dog Sale,” which I am absolutely not clicking on.

Seeing it in color, it’s enough to know that the Grand Central Gallery, which hosted a Sargent’s greatest hits show in 1924, did not literally paint their copyright claim on the face of the picture after all. But it also makes me think that Sargent, whose elegant, eel-like initials J.S.S. are on the bottom right, did not paint POINTY on the top, either.

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.

I had a speedrun through Manhattan to pick up some gifts and see some shows, starting with Gravity Pull, Liz Deschenes’ beautiful show of monochromes on Gorilla Glass in the morning light, plus some handblown Claude Glass-inspired pictures? Objects? Optical devices? Transfixing.