In 1907, after over twenty years of lucrative work painting portraits, John Singer Sargent closed his studio in London, and cut himself adrift to travel where and when he wanted.
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The American artists Jane de Glehn and her husband Wilfrid (1870-1951) were long-standing friends. Sargent first met Wilfrid around 1895 when he was working on murals in Boston Public Library, and Wilfrid married Jane Emmet (1873-1961), sister of Lydia Field Emmet, in 1904. The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy (1907) shows Jane working at a lightweight wooden easel in the grounds of the villa.
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The composition in his Dolce Far Niente (1907) is complex, with five of the figures staggered and slightly out of line along the gentle curve of the bank crossing this unusually wide canvas, its aspect ratio being more typical of marine views and panoramas. Against this are steep diagonals in the middle of the painting, formed by the edge of the brown reflection on the water, the male in the left pair of figures, and the closest female. The cropping of the horizon and any background beyond the immediate meadow and stream gives a sense of space and recession, aided by the foreshortening of the closest figure, despite the proximity of the individuals to one another.
The painting consists of a multitude of daubs, strokes, and dabs of colour, those marks composed to provide just enough information for the viewer to assemble them into the whole, which as a result ‘pops’ out in a vivid reality.
It’s thought that all three male figures were modelled by Nicola d’Inverno, the painter’s manservant, and the woman seen asleep appears to be his friend Jane de Glehn. Sargent had purchased the costumes in the Middle East during his travels there, and they were transported in trunks to this site, believed to be the brook at Peuterey in the Val d’Aosta, most probably in the summer of 1907.
This painting was hung in the summer exhibition of the New English Art Club, London, in 1909, and was favourably received by the critics. It was sold within an hour of the opening of the press view, to Augustus Healy, founder of the Brooklyn Museum, where it has hung ever since.
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Sargent’s bravura watercolour sketch of Grand Canal, Venice (1907) is composed of a sparse, even minimalist, collection of brushstrokes of watercolour assembled into a detailed view of the motif. He views Venice from the level of a gondola, the bows of which are also shown. His palette for these sketches is generally centred on earth colours for the buildings, with blue for the sky, water, and usually the shadows.
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The following year, his Flotsam and Jetsam follows in the same style, with the figures of young boys in the foreground sketched in roughly to suggest movement.
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Sargent was an early adopter of cadmium yellow pigment in watercolours such as Olive Trees, Corfu from 1909, where it ensured that his greens remained lightfast.
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He wasn’t dependent on sophisticated techniques, though: Rio dei Mendicanti, Venice from about 1909 works its magic almost entirely using a combination of passages using wet on dry and wet on wet. There isn’t even much in the way of a graphite drawing under its thin washes.
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Sargent met up with the plein air specialist Ambrogio Raffele again when he returned to the Alps during the summers of 1909 to 1911, and painted this watercolour of him as an Artist in the Simplon at some time in those years. Raffele is painting a view of the Fletschhorn, to the south-west of the Simplon Pass, using an improvised easel formed from two crossed poles.
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In the summers of 1909-11, Sargent stayed with various friends in the Bellevue Hotel at the top of the Simplon Pass, enjoying the cool mountain air at a time when much of the rest of Europe would have been stiflingly hot. While his family and friends whiled away their days in leisure, Sargent got them to pose for a unique series of informal portraits. They may have been reclining at leisure, but Sargent took those watercolours very seriously, and deployed an amazing array of techniques. Among the finest is his Simplon Pass: The Tease from the summer of 1911. For any watercolour artist, it is a lexicon of advanced techniques.
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One of the most unusual, used here extensively, is wax resist. Before applying paint, Sargent scribbled over areas that were intended to be vegetation, using a soft wax crayon, probably made from beeswax. On a fairly rough paper, the wax is deposited unevenly, and when painted over using watercolour it shows the white paper through. This creates disruptive patterns of near-white in the midst of the greens, and a superb effect.
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Most of the paint used is transparent watercolour, applied as a wash in small areas, and in gestural marks elsewhere. In the upper third of this detail, he has applied white gouache (opaque watercolour) sufficiently thickly for it to now have fine cracks. The large pale blue area crossing the middle appears to have been rewetted and some of its colour lifted to reduce its intensity, although most of his applications of paint over existing paint have been made wet on dry.
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Complex details such as the faces and hands of the figures have undergone multiple repainting, starting with the palest flesh of the face, and progressively darkening to near-black. In most cases, the clean edges of the marks demonstrate that these were applied wet on dry, with as many as six different layers in the hair.
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In the midst of this complex assembly of layers, Sargent still keeps to the lines of his original graphite sketch, which he uses to give the parasol form, and maintains small reserved areas, here forming the spectacle frames in the white of the paper. He could have used wax resist here, but if using pure beeswax it’s hard to keep the soft wax to fine lines.
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Sargent is the Chess Grand Master, the strategist whose moves at times might almost seem random or abstract, but in the end they all come together to bring this masterly watercolour to life.