The Portraits and Alligators of John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was one of America’s great artists (even though he was born in Italy), and while he specialized in portraits, he was also an excellent painter of other scenes. Sargent tended to earn lots of money painting portraits, but often found the life of a portrait artist to be a bit limited and frustrating. Because essentially who tended to commission portraits? Someone of wealth and/or power. And how would someone of wealth and power have wanted himself or his wife and family portrayed? In the very best manner, of course, which no doubt put great pressure on the artist to minimize flaws and do the best with sometimes less than perfect subjects. Sargent himself complained that every time he painted a portrait he lost a friend, and he may have even been questioning the whole concept of portrait painting when he said a “A portrait is a picture of a person with something wrong with the mouth.”

Click here for a general bio of Sargent, and here to read about the shocked reception of his white-shouldered, black velveted, low-cleavaged Portrait of Madame X. And then click here to see Sargent’s 1917 Muddy Alligators, a watercolor he reportedly undertook to escape working on his portrait of John D. Rockefeller, at a point when Sargent was probably yearning to just paint some beautifully ugly creatures as he saw them -- with no apologies necessary.