Renowned for his virtuoso portraits of society women, John Singer Sargent ranks with Thomas Eakins (q.v.) and Winslow Homer (q.v.) as one of the great nineteenth-century American painters. Born in Florence, Italy, to expatriate parents, Sargent spent much of his childhood moving around western Europe. He gained an early appreciation for Old World art and culture and was still in his teens when he decided to become a painter. After a brief period as a student in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Sargent went to Paris, where he studied privately with the progressive painter Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran (1837-1917). Inspired by the French artist, Sargent soon developed his own version of Carolus-Duran's direct and spontaneous painting style. In 1877 he exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon. His work gained the approval of critics, and over the next few years Sargent won several prizes in Salon competitions. Encouraged by his success, he opened his own studio in 1883. The following year, however, Sargent was severely criticized for his daring portrait, Madame X (1884, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); surprised by the negative publicity and already considering his prospects in England, the artist left Paris and was settled in London by 1886.

Having learned his lesson with Madame X, Sargent toned down his radical approach to portraiture and began to use his innovative painting techniques only insofar as they complimented his sitters. The artist enjoyed great success in England, and during the 1890s he became a member of the British Royal Academy and one of the favorite painters of the aristocracy. Sargent was increasingly involved in American art affairs as well, and in 1897 he was elected a full academician of the National Academy of Design. He regularly submitted his work to American exhibitions and fairs and won prizes consistently until the end of his life. After the turn of the century, Sargent began to tire of portrait painting; although he still took the occasional portrait commission, mural painting became his primary focus. During the last three decades of his life, Sargent worked on three public mural projects, including The Triumph of Religion for the Boston Public Library and smaller cycles for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Harvard's Widener Library. The artist died in London in April 1925.

The Currier's Untitled Study of a Male Nude and Arm is one of three charcoal drawings by Sargent in the Museum's collection. Freely executed figure sketches, they belong to a larger, now scattered group of more than 500 similar works that have been identified as preliminary studies for the artist's three mural projects. In these drawings, Sargent experimented with elements of pose, gesture, and expression, working quickly in an effort to arrive at the most effective figural arrangements. Ideas were kept, discarded, or modified as he progressed, and as a group, the mural drawings offer a fascinating and comprehensive insight into Sargent's thinking as he developed his compositional schemes.

The Currier's study of a male nude and arm is typical of Sargent's spontaneous and notational approach. Slight pentimenti show repeated adjustments to the contours of the figure's right arm and shoulder, yet the lower torso and legs are only barely indicated. Appearing alongside, but in a different scale, a disembodied arm reveals the artist on a new tack as he explores the structure of the hand and elbow. Sargent's apparent unconcern with centering and balancing his subjects on the paper suggests that he had little sense of the drawing's intrinsic value as a work of art; however, his sure draftsmanship and sensitive rendering of the human form effectively raise this study above ordinary sketches.

A comparison of the Currier study with Sargent's murals reveals that it is closely related to the artist's 1920-22 project for Harvard University. Approached by the trustees of Harvard to create a suitable memorial to students who had died while serving their country during World War I, Sargent responded with two large vertical compositions, Entering the War and Death and Victory. In the first, a procession of armed U.S. soldiers marches past allegorical figures of Britain, Belgium, and France as an American eagle and Old Glory soar overhead; in the second, the figures of Victory and Death bear a mortally wounded soldier from the battlefield. Completed within two years, the two canvases were formally unveiled in the Widener Library on November 1, 1922.

The Currier drawing is apparently a study for Sargent's Death and Victory. Holding aloft a palm branch and a wreath of laurel, Sargent's Victory replicates almost exactly the pose of the male figure in the Currier drawing. At the same time, the foreshortened elbow and grasping fingers of the study are precisely mirrored in the left arm of the fallen soldier, shown clasping Death's robes as he is lifted from the scene of combat. The overall composition was undoubtedly inspired by traditional images of apotheosis as well as contemporary sculptural groups, notably Alfred Gilbert's The Kiss of Victory (1878, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts).(1)

The Currier study and its two mates were presented to the Museum by Emily Sargent, the sister of the artist, sometime early in 1931. Between 1928 and 1934 Emily and another sister, Violet Ormond, made extensive gifts of Sargent's preparatory drawings to museums located primarily on the East Coast of the United States. The distribution of these works was managed by Boston architect Thomas Fox, who had served as Sargent's technical assistant on all three of his mural projects. Following a precedent set by the artist in 1921, when he gave fifty preparatory studies to the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Fox chose locations that were likely to exhibit the drawings as teaching aids. By the time the Currier Museum of Art formally accessioned the studies in 1939, Emily Sargent had died, and her gifts were recorded as a bequest.

VSD

NOTE

1. See Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, eds., John Singer Sargent. Ex. cat. Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p. 50.

REFERENCE

Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, eds. John Singer Sargent. Ex. cat. Tate Gallery, London, 1998.