The Museum's collection illuminates all aspects of Sargent's career. The drawings and watercolors in particular reflect his activity outside the portrait studio: his sojourns in Spain, Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, and in the Middle East; his enduring fascination with Venice; his holidays in the Italian lake district and the Alps; his tours of North America, including Florida and the Rocky Mountains; his visit as an official war artist to the western front in 1918; and his work as a muralist at the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University's Widener Library.

American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent

Arts & Photography

Herdrich, Stephanie L.

Weinberg, H. Barbara

History & Criticism

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sargent and Italy

This extravagantly illustrated catalogue--published in association with a major exhibition--evokes the romantic fascination with Italy that glimmers in the work of John Singer Sargent.
 Sargent, heralded on both sides of the Atlantic, was one of the most creative American artists of the late nineteenth century. Born in Florence to American parents living abroad, he retained a deep and lifelong connection to the country famed for its ability to get "ineradicably in one's blood." Sargent vacationed frequently in Italy, and most of the works he created there were painted not for commission but out of his artistic passion for Italy's people, land, and culture. Often hauntingly powerful, they range from dramatically painted genre scenes of Italian peasants and saturated landscapes that celebrate the beauty of the Italian countryside to portraits of other Anglo-American expatriates and tourists, including Henry James and Edith Wharton.
 The majority of works are of Italian sites, including well-known tourist spots but also the quieter, more isolated locales that Sargent sought out. His subjects include magnificent Italian gardens with their ancient and Baroque statuary, Rome's Neoclassical and Renaissance buildings, urban street scenes, the Italian Alps, and, of course, Venetian canals. Sargent found Venice particularly alluring, and the city well suited the watercolor medium in which he worked most often in Italy. His use of vivid colors, brushwork that varied from soft and fluid to bold and dashing, and an overwhelming sense of light and air characterize his Italian scenes--and rank Sargent as one of the finest watercolorists of all time. His later Italian works, some in watercolor and others in oil, reveal an artist who relished his materials and made art purely for art's sake. Both beautiful and informative, this lavish volume includes eighty-five color and fifty black-and-white images. It adds a new dimension to our appreciation of Sargent's art and will delight anyone who loves Italy, as Sargent so passionately did.

Fort, Ilene Susan

Dini, Jane

Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin

Ormond, Richard

Princeton University Press

A lush new volume devoted to the best works by beloved American Impressionist and portraitist John Singer Sargent, whose dazzling use of light and color depicts modern subjects with arresting intimacy. An ideal introduction to the painter’s work, Sargent: The Masterworks features 100 of his most beloved paintings. Illustrating all aspects of his diverse oeuvre—portraits, landscapes, mural commissions—in oil and watercolor, this handsome new book includes works from both private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s infamous Madame X. Author Stephanie L. Herdrich draws on a wealth of new research to provide both an essential overview and a more nuanced understanding of the great American painter. Richly illustrated, the book’s three chapters cover the artist’s career from his childhood and early years in Paris, to his mid-career portraits made in England and United States, and his later years painting out of doors. An illustrated chronology contains fascinating details and archival imagery about the artist’s life. Sargent’s cosmopolitan upbringing and education made him perfectly suited to capture the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie and aristocrats of his era, creating sensual portraits that depict his sitters with startling vibrancy. Though he achieved tremendous success in portraiture, Sargent focused on painting outdoors after 1900, achieving the most brilliant and personal images of his career. One of the greatest portraitists and watercolorists of his time, Sargent remains one of the most well-known and well-loved of all American artists.

Sargent: The Masterworks

Rizzoli Electa

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career\nLong celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas. Among these, The Gulf Stream (1899), often considered the most consequential painting of his career, reveals Homer’s lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.\nPublished by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press\nExhibition Schedule:The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 
(April 11–July 31, 2022)\nNational Gallery, London 
(September 10, 2022–January 8, 2023)

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents

Yount, Sylvia

Sargent and Paris

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