September 2010

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Sargent and the Sea presents Sargent the marine painter throughout chronologically ordered rooms of the Sackler wing in the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Beginning with works influenced by his family holidays to the Brittany and Normandy coasts, the exhibition takes us through a biographical tour of Sargent’s relationship with the Sea, including his adult trips to Capri, return to Venice and his late-life studies of various wharfs.

For the main part, the exhibition demonstrates Sargent as a master of white and light, focusing on the sea and sky, with the occasional formal or collective portrait, but always using the seascape as a backdrop. The work is refreshingly objective for then and now, and demonstrates a social understanding of the seaside as both a working-class and privileged resort – portraying the Artist’s Mother Aboard Ship (1876) and Fisherwomen Returning (1877). Sargent further demonstrates his command of the genre by portraying the sea as both a powerful force of nature and platform for frivolity.

Sargent’s ability to bring the sea and its patrons to life amid dark and broody skies to Summer coloured watercolours justifies this relatively niche exhibition. The independent strengths of the earlier maritime works gain confidence and come together nicely in the more casual, later paintings of Capri – using warm, illuminating colours that highlight the child figures in the foreground with a looser brush-work and evident pleasure in his new subject matter. Though these subjects gaze back at the viewer for the first time, Sargent employs the same, ambiguous face as used for his mother or costal worker – a trick to engage the audience with what always appears familiar. The prime example of these charming works is Neapolitan Children Bathing (1879) (see above), and which beautifully reflects Sargent’s infectious romanticism for Italy: “I am frightfully bitten from head to foot. Otherwise Italy is all that one can dream for beauty and charm.”

The final room reveals another Sargent through his watercolours. The larger-scaled, intimate works verge on the abstract with their focus on the patterns and colours created by the wooden hulls of boats, achieved by his proximity to the subject and the immediacy of the work – the recurring tell-tale sign being the prow of his own gondola in the foreground.

Though the Sackler Wing’s dismal dark grey walls do anything but emphasize Sargent’s illuminating seascapes, the chronological exhibition is well curated and digestible without pretense, a great achievement for any show displaying over 70 drawings, paintings and watercolours by a modern master.

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