Sargent Watercolor Show Coming

The Boston MFA and Brooklyn Museum are mounting a major exhibition of John Singer Sargent's exquisite watercolors this year.

Santa Maria della Salute, by John Singer Sargent, 1904, translucent and opaque watercolor with graphite underdrawing

The opportunity to see in person nearly 100 of Sargent's watercolors is fantastic news for east-coast painters and art lovers.  In these plein-air paintings, Sargent seems to have emerged from the shadowy pressure cooker of the portrait studio to respond freshly and spontaneously to the glorious play of light, form, color, and atmosphere that he saw and felt in the visible world.

Together, the 93 watercolors in the exhibition, most of which have not been on view for decades, provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to view a broad range of Sargent’s finest production, which must be among the finest of any artist's in the medium.

The landmark exhibition John Singer Sargent Watercolors unites for the first time the holdings of Sargent's watercolors acquired by the two institutions in the early 20th century. 

The exhibition will also present nine oil paintings, including Brooklyn’s “An Out-of-Doors Study, Paul Helleu and His Wife” (1889), and Boston’s “The Master and His Pupils” (1914). The exhibition will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from April 5 to July 28, 2013, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 13, 2013- January 20, 2014. It will then travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

I have raved about Sargent's watercolors in this space already, and I've discussed his marvelous sense of abstract design and his lovely and immortal oil, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose here as well. Some would class certain of Sargent's watercolors among the finest small paintings ever made. This show promises to bring the proper attention to what art historians have for too long considered a tangential aspect of Sargent's work.

Sargent's oil, The Master and His Pupils (1904) at the MFA

The Brooklyn Museum and MFA Publications are co-publishing a fully illustrated book to accompany the exhibition. Co-authored by the collaborative exhibition team, the volume includes a lead essay by the MFA's Erica E. Hirshler; a collaborative essay by the lead project conservators, Antoinette Owen and Annette Manick; and chapters that expand upon the exhibition’s thematic framework. 

For more information, visit www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/sargent_watercolors/ or www.mfa.org/exhibitions/john-singer-sargent-watercolors.

Spring at Maudslay

Spring is here and the time is right for painting in the streets, or at least amid the faded glory of former East India Trading Company estates in coastal Massachusetts.

I and two fellows of the fraternity of painters convened at Maudslay State Park in Newburyport yesterday to essay our impressions of nature. My small painting bears very little resemblance to the crystal-blue qualities of the day, but that is in keeping with my current practice of taking the subject as a starting point for however strong a painting the thing deigns to become.

Early Spring at Maudslay, Newburyport, MA 6x8

The grounds of this place are just full of beautiful views and endless motifs. The Merrimack River winds by it. In addition to the maintained grounds, one encounters old stone bridges and sealed wells, disused formal gardens and boarded-up outbuildings that attest to a formerly magnificent Old World empire, all beautiful with the earth still dormant in the tremulous light of spring.

Landscape painter Donald Jurney is offering a workshop at Maudslay in May. I highly recommend it.

I catch myself mentally saying "Maudslay" to myself over and over (like "Manderlay" I guess) and pronouncing it "MAW-dslee" in a ridiculously pompous British accent. I just can't help imagining it populated (sparsely, of course) with figures from an Edward Gorey drawing.

Simple Gifts

Today I had the great pleasure of spending the day painting outside at Canterbury Shaker Village in central New Hampshire.

After chatting with Maine artist Hanna Phelps, one of about a dozen artists with the NHPleinAir group, I parked my easel nearby on the edge of an old apple orchard and painted to the sound of birdsong and devoted men and women singing Shaker hymns.

My guiding principle for this painting was to concentrate on getting the value relationships right, that is, the degrees of the lights and the shadows relative to each other. Once that was done, I could think about playing colors off of each other (in particular the violet shadows and the complementary yellow highlights in the grass).

I was reminded while talking to Mary Byrom later that it's a good idea to allow either cool or warm colors to predominate (2/3 cool and 1/3 warm or vice verse). I'm not sure whether that happened or not (I certainly wasn't thinking about it), but I do like the way the cool sky and warm ground and foliage are sort of interlocked by the cool lavenders of the little shed on one side and the warm yellow-greens of the tree foliage projecting into the sky on the other.

I really wanted the eye to be drawn in and held, so I composed the background, clouds, foliage, and even the leaning fenceposts in the right foreground (which "point" you back to the main subject) in such a way that the design continually leads the eye back toward the heart of the painting.

This was one of the most delightful paint-outs I've ever been part of. Just think: this quiet rural New Hampshire community has hardly changed at all since the Shakers began fashioning household furniture and utensils and making maple syrup here in 1783. The land is rich with contours, venerable old-world trees, stone walls, and historic buildings (about half a dozen dating from the late 1700s, the rest from the nineteenth century).

Canterbury is one of the oldest, most typical, and best preserved Shaker villages in the country. The orchard I was painting in was laid out in its present form just over 100 years ago.