Displaying items by tag: Sargent

John Singer Sargent may be known for squandering his considerable gifts on paintings of socialites that he dashed off with nearly effortless panache, but “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends,” opening Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sets him in a different milieu than that of the merely moneyed and pedigreed.

We are brought up to think that when we have earned leisure and rest ... we may go forth and cross oceans and mountains and see on Italian soil the primal substance, the Platonic ‘idea’ of our consoling dreams and richest fancies.” Writing this in 1877, Henry James conjured the spell that Italy cast on his compatriots.

With the end of the civil war, the American dream could begin. Yet industrialis­ation was eating into the wilderness. Those of an artistic sensibility felt battered by what James described as “our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present”. Rooted in a classical past yet racing towards an avant-garde future, Europe beckoned like a promised land.

For would-be painters of modern life, Paris was the Mecca. The timeless, melancholy magic of Venice was also seductive. Yet the high drama of these cities discomfited too. When the US exiles longed for refuge, it was to Florence they turned, a city “without commerce, without other industry than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights ... with nothing but the little unaugmented stock of her medieval memories, her tender-coloured mountains, her churches, palaces, pictures and statues”, according to James.

A band of artists, mainly from New England, took up residence in villas overlooking the city. With its flower-filled gardens and sunlit olive glades, the landscape, so much more civilised than the great American wilderness, was an idyllic spot in which to practice the en plein air style they had learnt from the impressionists. Supplementing their colony was an Anglo-American literary elite including Bernard Berenson, Edith Wharton and James.

This exhibition shines a spotlight on those who either lived or passed through the Tuscan capital in the decades before the first world war. But the sprinkling of household names – John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Frederick Childe Hassam, Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler – were never permanent residents: Florence, as James noted, was a city where “by eight o’clock at night, apparently, everyone had gone to bed”. It lacked the cosmopolitan oomph to make it a cradle of the avant-garde and the paintings by those who did settle there, such as Frank Duveneck and his wife, Elizabeth Boott, lack the bold conviction and groundbreaking technique of works by their more famous peers.