24-Sept-99 Sargent at the MFA
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We had tickets for the John Singer Sargent show at the Museum of Fine Arts for tonight. We had four tickets, in fact, because we're members of the museum. Neither Anne nor Charley was particularly interested in the show, but Shirley and Jan took the two extra tickets.
I had mostly thought of Sargent as one of those very skilled people who did portraits that are hanging in English manor houses and mansions in Newport, but he's more complex than that. He was showing in the Salon in Paris when he was in his early twenties, a little after the time the impressionists didn't get accepted to the show. If you've ever heard of the distinction between linear and painterly art, and want to show an example of painterly, you can't do better than Sargent. Individual brush strokes show up all over the place, but the detail in the brush stroke seems to be exactly what the image wants. It's not just a swoosh of paint, but it has structure, almost a picture in itself -- at least, from a viewing distance you'd say the right details are there.
The painting that Arlene admired most was the one the Globe said had received the most attention -- Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose -- a picture of children lighting paper lanterns in a garden at dusk. Sargent worked on it over the course of two years, able to see the effect he was trying to capture for only about ten minutes each evening. It's hard to believe that the painting doesn't have its own light source; the lanterns glow as though there are still candles in them. The painting is phenomenal. It's a relief to know that the leading portraitist of his day, a mature artist who had been something of a child prodigy and had the best formal art education available, found it a challenge to do.
I liked some of the smaller paintings equally well. There's one scene of people walking on a beach that shows what you can do with paint that you can't do with a camera -- focus on the parts you're interested in, whether they're near or far, and leave the parts you're not interested in out of focus, even at the same distance. In that painting, the faces and arms of the people and masts and sails of boats far behind on the left are shown in detail. Legs, sand and water on the beach, and a lighthouse behind on the right are shown with few brushstrokes (though they are those Sargent brushstrokes with enough going on in each one that you don't miss the detail). I admire that kind of economy of effort, not wasting time on parts of the painting that don't matter, but knowing which they are so the viewer doesn't mind -- and of course having such superb control of color and of the brush that a few brushstrokes do the job.
Hey, let me put in a plug for the Google search engine here. I tried looking for “Boston+Museum+Sargent” from my ISP's generic search engine and drew a blank. With the same search string, Google came up with 1324 matches in 0.59 seconds, with that link I gave at the top of the page as the first choice.
Shirl and Jan had walked the entire Freedom Trail during the day. We met them at the MFA without any trouble (though the exhibit was packed) and went through a few other rooms at the museum to find the Sargent murals on the ceiling of the rotunda. Sargent had wanted to get into murals because he thought it was a more permanant medium than oils or watercolor and would give him lots of exposure for years to come. I've never noticed them particularly on previous trips to the museum. Now that I've looked at them, I'm not impressed.
My sore mouth had become swollen by late afternoon, and I was able to phone the dentist when the four of us got back to our house. He phoned in a prescription for antibiotics right away.
We had dessert and drove Shirl and Jan out to David's place where they were staying. With my toothache, I don't think I was very good company at that point.
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