calendario eventi  :: 

X

9/7/2010

John Singer Sargent

Royal Academy of Arts, London

The Royal Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of works by John Singer Sargent RA (1856- 1925). Sargent was born in Florence to expatriate American parents. A widely travelled and sophisticated cosmopolitan, he is best known as one of the greatest painters of his day – “the Van Dyck of our times” as the sculptor Auguste Rodin called him. In this exhibition, however, we discover a different and less familiar side of the artist: Sargent the marine painter. Over 70 paintings, drawings and watercolours produced during the young artist’s travels from Paris to the Normandy and Brittany coasts, the Italian island of Capri, and to various Mediterranean ports form the subject of this revelatory exhibition, the first in Britain to explore this aspect of Sargent’s achievement.

The exhibition focuses on the formative years of Sargent’s artistic career covering the period of 1874 to around 1879. It opens with works made during summer expeditions to the Normandy and Brittany coasts in 1874 and 1875 and continues with a series of outstanding and innovative seascapes, including three newly discovered works that were inspired by Sargent’s experience of the Atlantic when he visited his native America for the first time. A group of drawings and a little- known scrapbook lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, reveal Sargent’s precocious talent as a draughtsman and his detailed knowledge of ships’ rigging and tackle.

Sargent and the Sea features three major exhibition pictures of Sargent’s early career: En Route pour la pêche, an imposing painting of fisherfolk in the little Breton port of Cancale, which was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1878; Fishing for Oysters at Cancale which established Sargent’s reputation in America when it was first shown in New York in the spring of 1878; Neapolitan Children Bathing, a vivid evocation of the brilliant light and blue sea of Capri that was exhibited to glowing reviews in New York the following year. A group of Mediterranean port scenes in oil and watercolour add another dimension to Sargent’s maritime oeuvre. To complement the exhibition there is a selection of the dazzling boating watercolours that Sargent painted in Venice in the early twentieth century.

For Sargent, the sea represented new horizons and stimulated new artistic ideas, as is evident from the range of his early marine subjects that are on view in the exhibition. Positioned between the traditional and the modern, Sargent tested the boundaries of marine art with unconventional viewpoints, the realism with which he rendered light and tone, and the bravura brushwork that would be a distinguishing feature of his later career.

Exhibition Tour
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 12 September 2009 – 03 January 2010
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 14 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
Royal Academy of Arts, London 10 July 2010 – 26 September 2010

Catalogue
To accompany this exhibition, Yale University Press and the Corcoran Gallery of Art have published a catalogue that includes essays that explore different aspects of Sargent’s marine paintings by the distinguished Sargent scholars Richard Ormond, Sarah Cash, Erica E. Hirshler, Stephanie L. Herdrich and Marc Simpson.

Contact details for press information
Telephone 020 7300 5615
Fax 020 7300 8032
Email press.office@royalacademy.org.uk

Image: John Singer Sargent, 'En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish)', 1878. Oil on canvas, 78.8 x 122.8 cm.

Opening from 10 July 2010

Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House Piccadilly, London
Open 10am – 6pm daily (last admission 5.30pm)
to Late night opening: Fridays until 10pm (last admission 9.30pm)
Admission: £10 full price; £9 registered disabled and 60 + years; £8 NUS / ISIC cardholders; £4 12–18 years and Income Support; £3 8–11 years; 7 and under free.

stampa

permanent link