Name: Why Sargent Painted Outside The Lines
Uploaded: 2025-02-07T13:41:36.000Z
Duration: 8 min
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Adverbs of manner

Clearly it's paint, thick streaks of paint loosely applied at various angles, unblended.

Adverbs of degree

You can almost see the paintbrush making the strokes across the canvas.

Nothing recognizable seems to be depicted here.

At this distance, the image looks messy and abstract.

At this distance, those loose brush strokes perfectly resolve into a yellow shawl wrapped around a young woman in a billowy mint green dress who's laying back on a couch in an elegant room, an image of sweet afternoon repose, which is the name of this canvas from my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent.

This difference between the close-up and the view of the whole canvas is the key to understanding Sargent's genius.

Everywhere you look in this painting, you see his supremely confident looseness, a kind of painting you maybe wouldn't think to associate with a realistic representation of the world.

And yet that's exactly the final effect, a realism that is somehow more true than finely detailed painting.

Where did Sargent's confidence in this technique come from?

Well, to understand that, you have to understand Sargent's teacher, Carolus Duran, a 19th century French painter who bucked the academic emphasis on outline drawing, in which you would essentially paint inside the lines, building up and detailing your canvas section by section until the whole thing came together.

Duran taught his students to abandon outlines and focus on capturing the colors and tonal values of what they saw.

In painting, tonal value refers to how light or dark something is, with black being the darkest and white the lightest.

Everything you see exists along that spectrum, and Duran believed that if you captured all the tonal relationships in your canvas accurately, if you got the ratios right, you'd present the reality we see more honestly.

In essence, his students had to learn to look at the world differently, flattening their sight to let objects melt into their values and colors, and the two-dimensional shapes they make.

Then they had to get these shapes onto the canvas in paint, never working on one section for too long so as not to throw those value ratios off, because the painting is always a unity, a delicate series of relationships.

Duran's students learned to see beyond objects, to the light and color effects that describe them, and what they discovered is that this two-dimensional way of seeing produced paintings that were more three-dimensional in effect than anything that began with an outline.

It's a method Duran learned in part from Diego Velazquez, a Spanish painter who lived 200 years prior and was in many ways 200 years ahead of his time.

If you look at Velazquez's career, you see him transition from the decorative conventions of his time to an earnest revolutionary attempt to capture his impression of reality.

Sargent came of age as the Impressionist movement, led by Claude Monet, flowered.

He was friends with Monet, staying with, learning from, and even painting him on occasion.

But Sargent was not usually counted among Impressionists with a capital I.

He was part of a broader group, Impressionists with a lowercase i, in the way Velazquez was, in the way Duran was, in the sense that the impressions of light and color were his subjects.

Sargent rapidly absorbed Duran's teaching and then exceeded him, a moment symbolized in his extraordinary portrait of Duran, which was honored by the Paris Salon of 1879 when Sargent was just 23.

I mean, look at this face, the highlights on the forehead, nose, and lips, the upturned mustache, and the hair, fully realized without a touch of fine detail.

Look at how he conjures a ring with a drop of yellow paint.

As the novelist Henry James wrote, the young Sargent presents the uncanny spectacle of a talent which, on the very threshold of its career, has nothing more to learn.

This wasn't true, of course, but it spoke to Sargent's exceptional gift.

The Duran painting was a calling card for Sargent's portrait business, and high society came knocking en masse.

Given how many he did, Sargent is known chiefly as a portrait painter, and he is, simply put, the greatest portraitist who ever lived, capturing all the glamour of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages.

After this stunning painting of a wealthy socialite caused a scandal in Paris for being too racy, Sargent moved to England and soon embarked on what I think is his greatest work, Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.

Sailing along the Thames one summer evening, he saw Chinese lanterns hanging amid the foliage and was instantly moved to capture that interplay of light.

The only problem is that this magical light, as we all know, only emerges for a few fleeting minutes every evening, and only in the summers.

Sargent worked for two years on the painting, patiently waiting each day for the special moment to arrive, at which point he would have his friend's daughters pose in white dresses and work feverishly while the light lasted.

After painting and repainting again and again, he finally captured it.

And here you can see the real merit of dialing in those values and colours, because what Sargent gets here, by the accumulation of little effects, is an atmosphere, a mauvish colouring that seems like it's in the air itself, which is what it really feels like to be outside on a summer evening.

Sargent fused the lessons of Duran, Velazquez, the Impressionists, the Realists, with his own singular talent to forge a style in which mere suggestions laid down with a practiced looseness resolve at the right distance into the world.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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