The 1880s were a time of great economic change in Paris. After the upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and the short-lived Paris Commune (May 1871), the latter in particular leaving many parts of the city destroyed, the Third Republic emerged as the ruling government of France. The elite of the Third Republic were businessmen and politicians who supported the continued development of modern industrial capitalism and embraced the possibilities of upward mobility. Even the lower classes could aspire to the middle class by saving their money and attaining a good education. Between 1852 and 1882, men’s wages rose an average of about 84 percent, and the cost of living fell (Davis, 158).
The end of the nineteenth century also brought changes to the art world. In 1890 the new Salon du Champ de Mars was established by the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts after accusations of corruption in the Salon. Private art schools sprang up to fill the demand created by an influx of art students from around the world, providing technical instruction in preparation for admittance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The Academie Julian was the most ambitious and successful of these. Impressionism, no longer the avant-garde, made way for Symbolism and Cubism.
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to wealthy American parents; his uprooted childhood was spent frequently travelling. He settled in Paris as a young man in 1874 to train at the studio of Carolus-Duran, a portraitist well-known at the time whose methods were rather progressive compared to the dogmatic teachings of the Academy. He taught his students to work quickly and paint what they saw without preliminary sketches, au premier coup, at first touch (Davis, 65). He characteristically backed away from the canvas to check the composition, then raced forward with his brush to capture the next stroke. Sargent adapted this method, later commenting that he ran about four miles a day when painting a portrait. Carolus-Duran admired Velazquez, and frequently brought up his example; Sargent had a chance to study him in person in Spain in 1879.
Sargent exhibited at the Salon every year from 1877 to 1886. In 1879 he submitted a portrait of his master Carolus-Duran, a bold move that won him several French patrons. He turned increasingly to portraiture, a decision borne of economic necessity as his parents grew old and his sister Emily never married. The subjects of his portraits were members of the upper class, particularly the nouveau-riche—by the late 1890s the fee for a full-length portrait was approx. £50,000 (in 1990s currency). Sargent also travelled to the U.S. and England to complete portrait commissions. Despite his reputation, he failed to get a satisfactory number of assignments in Paris: the French favored their own artists, and Sargent was, after all, an American. After the “Madame X” scandal in 1884 over his rather unorthodox portrait of a great society beauty, he relocated permanently to London in 1886.
Sargent’s style has elements of both academic and avant-garde painting. He updated European grand manner portraiture by offering a unique combination of academic draughtmanship and solid modeling of form with sketchy brushstrokes and a fresh approach to composition. Instead of the static upright pose of conventional portraiture, Sargent selected for his subjects asymmetrical, tilting poses—precarious, ephemeral, and often uncomfortable for the subject to maintain throughout several sittings, they created a powerful sense of presence, casual and immediate. Such self-consciously artificial poses betray the sitter’s collaboration with the painter, a gesture of play-acting that reveals the artifice inherent in the act of painting. The quick, feathery brushwork and bright tonality intensify the sense of movement and immediacy in the piece. There is a vibrancy, perhaps even a nervous energy, to each representation, which also captures something of the individual. Sargent’s portraits are a “powerful projection of the sitter’s presence, not in the timeless realm of traditional portraiture, but in the modern here-and-now” (Prettejohn, 74). It is in the context of this lucrative trans-Atlantic portrait practice that he painted the portrait of his American friend Sarah Sears, Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears, in 1899.
The portrait of Mrs. Sears is executed according to Sargent’s winning formula as described above. She dominates the life-size canvas, clothed in dazzling white against an indeterminate dark background. The glass piece at her right elbow seems to exist only to display Sargent’s technical virtuosity. She sits almost on the edge of her seat, twisting to her right, knees pressed together, two fingers propped against her neck. This does not look like a comfortable position, but it creates a dynamic sense of tension and movement. Sargent has modeled her form like a true academic, her face and hands given bodily weight as defined by lines and blended tonalities (you can see her wedding ring, even the glint of light on her fingernail); yet her dress explodes in a profusion of sketchy brushstrokes, dissolving at close range—white over pink, lavender, and blue. The bouquet in her left hand is comprised of swirls of color, possibly roses. She does not look directly at us, a small smile on her lips, privy to the theater created. There is tension between realist illusion and painterly artifice, a result of the collision of the academic and the modern.
Frederick Carl Frieseke, like Sargent, was an American expatriate who lived the majority of his life overseas. Born in 1874, he grew up in Michigan and Florida. From 1893 to 1896 he attended the Art Institute of Chicago (incidentally, one of his teachers had studied under Bouguereau at the Academie Julian). In 1896 he moved to New York City, where he worked as an illustrator; in 1897 he set sail for Paris. Upon arrival he enrolled at the Academie Julian, where he studied until 1900. He concurrently attended Whistler’s short-lived Academie Carmen, and became a great admirer of his. The academic training he received in the U.S. and at Academie Julian was supplemented by Whistler’s teachings, which emphasized surface design, art as artifice, and judiciously selecting from nature what to include, or not include, in the composition. In 1905 Frieseke married Sadie, an excellent match. They divided their time between Paris and the artists’ colony in Giverny, where Monet lived*, until 1919, after which they bought a home in Normandy. Like Sargent, he was able to establish a successful career and exhibited at the Salon (in 1899, 1901-1922, 1925, and throughout the 1930s), though in Frieseke’s case it was at the new Salon established in 1890.
It was during his time in Giverny that Frieseke increasingly devoted himself to painting outdoor scenes en plein air. He described his artistic goals in an interview in 1912: “It is sunshine, flowers in sunshine; girls in sunshine; the nude in sunshine… I try as much as possible to make a mirror of the canvas… but I paint what I see that is interesting and which appeals to me at that moment” (Weinberg, 53). Frieseke’s work balances an interest in the effects of light with an emphasis on the structure of the figure. Though his rapid rendering of rough brushstrokes, attention to decorative effects and the flatness of the canvas, and selection of commonplace, everyday subjects are distinctly modern, his emphasis on solid form demonstrates his academic bias. He thus synthesizes principles from the academic tradition with aspects of modern work from Whistler and Renoir. It is here in Giverny, and the relaxed enjoyment of time outdoors, that he painted Sunbath in 1913.
Sunbath is a mid-sized oil on canvas depicting a woman seated on a lawn chair in a garden. The canvas had been primed a mustard yellow; Frieseke then applied the paint so thinly that large areas of the canvas peek through. This lends a deep, warm, even orangey-pink hue to the painting, implying that the sun had begun to set. The woman appears to be in the middle of getting up, her back rounded and head tilted. She is dressed rather casually in a light pink ensemble with a narrow silhouette, and has a parasol at her side. The grass, trees, and flowers are quick, colorful daubs of paint; the woman’s dress and material draped over the chair are done in similarly loose strokes. Her body has weight, though, and her face, neck, hands, calves, and feet are modeled with clear lines and a blending of color. While the garden surrounding her dissolves into fragments, the woman is firmly seated, the full weight of her body conveyed.
Sargent’s and Frieseke’s work is a distinctive synthesis of the academic and the modern. Both men trained as artists after Impressionism appeared on the art scene; the influence of the Impressionist brushstroke on their work is clear. Although they interpreted that influence differently and developed their own unique style, they nevertheless created an approach to modern art that offered something different to the avant-garde mainstream. Perhaps their status as foreigner—simultaneously participant and outsider—lent them the ability to perceptively pick and choose elements from both the academic and the modern.
* Monet retired more and more behind his garden walls, as younger artists watched him paint and courted his stepdaughters. He refused to see most everyone, especially Americans and artists; but he liked Sadie, and the Friesekes were able to have an easy relationship with him.
Bibliography
Davis, Deborah. Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X. Penguin: New York, 2003.
Kilmer, Nicholas, Virginia M. Mecklenburg, David Sellin, H. Barbara Weinberg. Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionst. Princeton University Press: New Jersey, 2001.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Interpreting Sargent. Stewart, Tabori & Chang: New York, 1998.
Richard Ormond. “Sargent, John Singer.” In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T076043 (accessed April 30, 2012).
Rodgers, David. “Sargent, John Singer.” In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2348 (accessed April 30, 2012).
