Sargent: The Watercolours

St Vigilio, John Singer Sargent, 1913. Private Collection

   
The Anglo-American artist, John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) was renowned as a painter of portraits in oils, some of which were featured in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2015. But at the age of 51, he decided he'd had enough of the medium and his society clients. “Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working,” he confessed to a friend. “What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched.”









Financially secure, he escaped from the confines of his studio and began painting purely for pleasure using watercolours, which he’d enjoyed while young. These allowed him to record, rapidly, any scene that caught his eye. Some of the results (above) are almost abstract. He made annual trips to Italy, Spain, Corfu and the Middle East, often with family and friends, concentrating on subjects of his own choosing.

  This exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery contains 80 of these works from more than 30 lenders, dating from 1900 to 1918, as well as many personal photographs that add context to his output. It’s arranged thematically, grouping together landscapes, cities and people.

Spanish Fountain, John Singer Sargent, 1912. Fitzwilliam Museum

   Interestingly, he rarely painted buildings as complete entities, but concentrated on segments, focusing on form and pattern. “Spanish Fountain” is closely cropped – the grandeur of the setting left mostly to the imagination.

Venetian Fishing Boats, John Singer Sargent. 1904 - 9 Tate

   Venice is captured from canal level, through a tangle of masts and rigging.

Sketching on the Giudecca, John Singer Sargent, 1904. National Museum of Wales

   Another view includes two of his friends in a gondola. You can just see the prow of the one he is working from.

The Lady with the Umbrella, John Singer Sargent, 1911 Museu de Montserrat

   The exhibition ends with a selection of his figurative paintings, including one of his niece, Rose Marie, “The Lady with the Umbrella”. (Sadly, she later died in shelling in WW1, while nursing French soldiers in a church.) She lies back, relaxed, looking languidly at the viewer, her dress a free-flowing wash of pinks, greys and blues. It’s a portrait, but far removed from the formal ones of his earlier years and, as with most of the other paintings, sparkling with the effects of light and shade. His great nephew Richard Ormond, who co-curated this lovely show, says the pictures reveal Sargent’s zest for life and his pleasure in the art of painting. “The fluency and sensuality of his paint surfaces and his wonderful command of light never cease to astonish us. With this exhibition we hope to demonstrate Sargent’s mastery of the medium and the scale of his achievement.” 

The exhibition runs until October 8, 2017. Admission £15.50 (concessions available)

http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/

London's Christmas lights

London's West End has really pulled out all the stops with its Christmas decorations this year. Here are some of the trees outside Selfridges department store in Oxford St.

Pause outside the shop's windows and you'll find a series of glittering life-sized Santas. An explanatory video charts the year-long process of creating them. (Apparently it took 193 hours to sew on the Santa sequins.)

The Bond St decorations are always elegant, and this year is no exception.

Department stores like House of Fraser and John Lewis have got into the festive mood with illuminated shop fronts.

Some stores may have Santas, but John Lewis has returned to nature, with lots of woodland creatures and of course the trampolining dog from its television commercial.

If you're in need of a break from the crowds, John Lewis has created a winter garden on its roof terrace. There are private dining cabins and a pop-up restaurant nestled among the fir trees.

When you get to Regent St, you'll find a string of ethereal angels hovering over the traffic - stunning, and so much more attractive than the commercialised decorations that have cropped up in recent years.

Liberty's decorations take their inspiration from the Royal Ballet and the Nutcracker, with these storybook figures flanking the doorway.

The windows recreate scenes from the ballet, using puppets. Here's Clara admiring her family's tree.

Around the corner, Carnaby St looks back its heyday in the Swinging 60's with a nod to the V+A's exhibition You Say You Want a Revolution.

 

Should you feel like venturing further afield, the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which next year celebrates its 200th anniversary) has transformed its grounds with a Winterlights trail (until Dec 18).

While you're there, you can see wintry masterpieces in the Gallery's collection, and admire the baroque Christmas tree, guaranteed not to shed needles. Season's Greetings everyone!

Eric Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

It's well worth the journey to south London for this fascinating new exhibition. Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) had a career that spanned both peace and war. The show concentrates on his watercolours, with 90 or so works on display, many from private collections, and not often seen.

They capture fleeting moments: landscapes, gardens and buildings in sun and rain, but with a distortion or unusual angle that is disquieting and makes you look again. (Left: Tea at Furlongs, 1939, ©The Fry Collection)

The Wilmington Giant (©Victoria and Albert Museum), carved into a hillside, is seen through a barbed-wire fence; the White Horse of Westbury is glimpsed through the window of a train carriage, as if someone rushed to take a photo, but didn’t hold the camera straight. November 5 (Private Collection) shows back gardens on Guy Fawkes night. You look down at firework parties and excited crowds, but then see that in one back yard revellers are wearing animal heads – a pagan ritual, perhaps?

In 1939 Ravilious was invited to become an official war artist, with the rank of honorary captain in the Royal Marines. He worked in the UK, the Arctic, Norway and Iceland, his subjects ranging from the meticulous portrayal of the control rooms below London to ship convoys, bomb-defusing operations, gunfire, warplanes in action and life in the confined quarters of a submarine. (Below: Hurricane in Flight, Private Collection).

In 1942 he flew to Iceland with the RAF and joined an air-sea rescue mission, only to be lost when his aircraft disappeared. He was 39. (Below:Midnight Sun © Tate London).

The exhibition takes a thematic approach to his too-brief career, showing how Ravilious integrated rather than abandoned many of his ideas and instincts when he became a war artist. It starts with Relics and Curiosities - paintings that reveal the artist's fascination with interesting objects – then moves on to Interiors, Figures and Forms, Place and Seasons, Changing Perspectives and Darkness and Light, with excellent explanations and descriptions by the curator, James Russell.  It’s the first major exhibition of Ravilious’s works to concentrate on his paintings rather than his print-making, and shows why he is now regarded as one of the 20th century’s finest watercolourists. I'd seen only  isolated examples of his art in the past, so having so many paintings brought together and put in context was a real revelation. Thoroughly recommended.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, to August 31

http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk