Spend enough time in Boston and you will find yourself fronted by John Singer Sargent’s vaguely austere virtuosity. His mural work has the knack for seeming even grander than it is, possessing a rococo classicism that can feel somewhat like a formal textbook lesson—on Greek mythology—made visual. His portraits, which provided a goodly chunk of his sizable income, flatter, but coolly. Women tend to become slimmer in them, men are made more regal, as though the sitter’s internal qualities have been cleaned up, formalized, and distilled into an outward image meant to please. That iteration of Sargent, for all of the bravura skill, can be a touch stiff.
So one might say that this large exhibit—it fills a dozen rooms—of Sargent’s watercolors is akin to what one experiences when, say, leaving behind Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa for the open wealds of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. For what we have here is Sargent cutting loose in a way he never did in his more formal oils and murals.
These ninety-two watercolors were rendered between 1902 and 1911 in Greece, Spain, Portugal, the Alps, Syria, Palestine, Italy, and Switzerland. Sargent was basically done, at this point, with elaborate portraiture. He had also had his fill of murals, too, and what one experiences throughout this exhibit is a painter painting for himself after a distinguished career of earning. In fact, as the show’s co-curator Erica Hirshler, of the MFA, discovered in her researches, Sargent never intended the watercolors to