Even Homer Nods
I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to painting. I certainly don’t dismiss modern or abstract art, but I usually find more to enjoy in figurative painting. And I’m a sucker for plain simple craftsmanship; the miraculous ability to capture a glint of light with a casual stroke of the brush, a fold in a satin cloth. It must be innate. I’m sure it can’t be taught.
I play the guitar. I’m not very good, but I do know all five chords. Recently I’ve been practising Amos Garrett’s sublime guitar solo, one of the finest ever created, on Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis.” And now, after ten years or so, I can reproduce it pretty accurately. It sounds similar. You can tell what it is. But what I could never do in a million years is conjure up that glorious waterfall of notes by myself. Amos Garrett fleshed out David Nichtern’s skeleton chords to create a beauty worthy of John Singer Sargent. My use of the same material comes out more like Frankenstein’s monster. I can copy, but I can’t create — musically, at least.
This is all getting somewhere, and it leads to a line. It’s a simple, brief, slightly kinked monoline, and it delineates the backbone of a cow. At the John Singer Sargent exhibition “Sargent and The Sea” at the Royal Academy, the great European portrait painter (of American parentage) shows a different side of his genius — his affection for the sea. The small exhibition ranges from large oils as seen below, to tiny dashed off pencil sketches. One sticks in my mind, and I’d show it to you if I could. On a small scrap of paper torn from a notebook, Sargent rapidly sketched a herd of cattle in the hold of a ship, seen from above.
A simple stroke of the pencil — not studied, just drawn — marks the backbone of one cow. Neck slightly twisted, this one cow is angled a fraction away from her sisters. This simple line of pencil, barely an inch, is something I could never hope to emulate. Sargent saw it and recorded it, probably without thinking. It was just what he did. There’s no rubbing out and repeated attempts, there it is. A bovine stroke of genius.
Genius is not a description lightly bestowed, but I think John Singer Sargent merits it. His portraits of women, for which he was most famous, are simply breathtaking. An exhibition of his work a few years back was advertised something like this:
TWO STEPS TO LOOKING BEAUTIFUL
1. Get your portrait painted by John Singer Sargent
2. That’s it.
But for one so famous at conveying the human face and form, our hero sometimes seems to falter at this exhibition. Take this “Neapolitan Children Bathing”, painted in 1879 when Sargent was 23. You can feel the heat, you just know the languid carelessness of the two boys lying on the sand, the arm flung over to shield the eyes is perfectly observed. And the attitude of the toddler staring in bewilderment at the painter is so true to life.
But what happened to the toddler’s face? Is it unfinished? Was the child deformed in some way? It is a dreadful mess, especially from such a gifted portraitist as Sargent. I am baffled. The rest of the scene is faultless. I love the pigs’ bladders in use as waterwings. But that face! Even Homer nods.
I cannot find any fault with “En Route pour la pêche” from the previous year. For me this is a masterpiece. Everything about it works for me, especially the contre-jour lighting and the reflections in the puddles. Perhaps the startling thing is the freshness and vivacity of the original, utterly missing in this drab digital reproduction. The painting sings. The whites are whiter, the blues bluer, the summer day is eternal. It is fabulous.
You can see what the original looks like from this reproduction. Much like you could spot that the thing Gwyn was playing was Amos Garrett’s solo from “Midnight At The Oasis.”
Sargent and the Sea
10 July 2010 to 26 September 2010
John Singer Sargent
Neapolitan Children Bathing, 1879
Oil on canvas
16.8 x 41.1 cm
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1955.852
John Singer Sargent
En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878
Oil on canvas
78.8 x 122.8 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund 17.2
This exhibition has been organised by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts.
