CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/15/2016

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

"Sargent continued to find in the watercolor medium the means to record the evanescence of personality and vibrations of emotions that had little place in his late commissioned portraits. Both qualities are poignantly apparent in a late watercolor of Alice Runnels James... His gently, carefully modeled description of the features and suggestion of the pallid, listless figure point to the physical ills and neurasthenia to which this sometimes vivacious young woman was prone. The lower body is so thinly painted as to be dematerialized—a fainter volume than the robust pillows—clearly revealing the lines of Sargent's drawing. In an essay on artistic personality, Sargent's longtime friend Vernon Lee asserted that a great artist's work must be 'at once the portrait of those for whom he paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, their intenser selves.' It is perhaps in his watercolor portraits, which Sargent painted largely for himself, that we might look for further traces of his 'intenser' self." – Teresa A. Carbone, John Singer Sargent: Watercolors