[Music] [Music] by 1900 john singer sargent was the most admired the most sought-after portraitist in the western world he exquisitely portrayed in oil and water color the elegance of the gilded age the last days of Queen Victoria the time of extravagant clothing and extravagant tastes it after his death his work was quickly dismissed as superficial and passive now the re-examination of not only his portraits but his numerous landscapes thicker paintings and murals reveals sergeant for one of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries an artist consistently pushed outside the framework of acceptability to capture the essence of his times and the carnage of the first world war that brought his era to its bloody end [Music] [Music] john singer sargent outside the frame is made possible by a generous grant from the Eugene B casey foundation [Music] a Gilded Age it is the time of George Bernard Shaw of Claude Monet who Oscar Wilde the height of aristocracy in Edwardian society few suspect that beneath that beautiful veneer by the seeds of revolution and world war john singer sargent captured both the beauty and complexity of this time by standing apart from it in Paris he was the expatriate American in London the radical French painter in America the sophisticated European she spoke many languages he moved very freely through all sorts of society but he was announced he never fully belong [Music] that's not easy but it has an artistic benefit because it does give you a certain objectivity a certain distance you stand outside of of traditions of conventions that can be inhibiting for artists who have to work within them it's very much a part of his angle of vision of his artistic point of view [Music] his friend Vernon Lee wrote sergeants knife was absorbed in his painting and the summing up of a would-be biographer must I think be he painted John Singer Sargent was born in Florence Italy 1856 his parents have left Philadelphia where his father was a surgeon they came for a trip to Europe and never went home [Music] they used to spend winters down in Rome nice Florence and then migrate north to PO Switzerland Dresden it was a fairly ruthless existence for companionship John relied on his sister Emily just one year his junior the second sister Violet was born when John was 14 the children grew up among the wonders of Europe becoming fluent in English French Italian and German dr. Sargent was responsible for their education and religious training but it was Mary Sargent herself an artist who took them to every Museum Palace and Gardens she could not a day went by that John spurred on by his mother didn't complete a sketch she wrote john appreciates the beauties of nature and art which are lavishly displayed in these old lands he sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye sergeant from about the age of 10 is determined to be an artist and he studies in various art schools Florence President Berlin and so then this father give concedes and alrighty it's gonna have the best education where's the place you go to Paris 1874 the streets are filled with rubble led from the franco-prussian war the word Impressionism is coined Monet Pissarro digger and Renoir are ridiculed olicity press sergeant is 18 and studying at the equity bazaar I'm in the midst of my exam and very busy it seems unreasonably long difficult and terrible the supreme moment is one of 12 hours wherein we must make a finished drawing of the human form divine the next order of business was to join a studio associated with the master artist Sargent chose carefully Emil Carlos Duran was known for harsh criticism and rare praise recognizing Talent he accepted sergeant on the spot with this admonition you have studied much but much that you have learned you must forget the training at these Ecole de bazaar in Paris in the 19th century was was very thorough very intensive very time-consuming the best in the world attracted people from all over the world but it was highly disciplined put a great deal of stress on drawing drawing from from casts from the antique as it was called and and only then working working up then through the live model to paint it in collister all in a sense turned that on its head and got people painting right away they learned not the laborious sort of academic craftsmanship but how to paint what they saw in terms of tonal values Callister I used to say search for half ten and a half ten each stroke of the brush to give you a tone and it was through the modeling of town through how you approach light and dark that his pupils learned to translate what they saw in terms of decisive single brush strokes sergeant seems to have absorbed with extraordinary facility this ability to in a series of brushstrokes to conjure up form and to model form [Music] Paris was the center of artistic innovation sargent navigated his way through Impressionism naturalism and realism charting his own course he made sure his work was acceptable to those who could make or break a career but he stretched the limits of convention wherever possible challenging both himself and the viewer combining traditional methods with a new emphasis on spontaneity he painted oyster gatherers of cacao in 1878 the painting became sergeant's first major success at the career-making Paris salon he was only 22 years old an American and a student for only four years yet he had achieved the official salon recognition the contemporaries like mango and Cezanne never enjoyed [Music] sergeant continued to stretch his artistic muscles he experimented with Impressionism creating a dead guy like portrait of the Paris orchestra rehearsal [Music] he continued to travel each year across the continent as in childhood but now with the purpose [Music] certainly after he enters Carlos Turan studio his travelling becomes more focused because it's combined with his training on the threshold of an artistic career he now become something of a careerist in his travel he's no longer really an amateur [Music] [Music] [Music] he never does a full-scale view of the Piazza San Marco or the Duomo instead seeks out elements of the Venetian environment which are pictorially arresting filled with deep even profound elements of Venetian life [Music] it was the exotic far-fetched quality which always attracted John Sargent the words strange weird fantastic or on his lips that word curious was his dominant word for many years Vernon Lee [Music] he traveled to Tangier where he was struck by the unsparing light of North Africa and found exotic mysterious subjects novelist Henry James upon seeing the painting film a dome burglary wrote I know not who this stately [ __ ] may be nor in what mysterious domestic or religious right she may be engaged but in her muffled contemplation and her pearl coloured robes she is beautiful and memorable the picture is exquisite a radiant effect of white upon white of similar but discriminated tones Henry James who made on burglary boosted sergeants meteoric rise receiving rave reviews at the Paris salon with 1880 [Music] the story goes of course that by the end of his four years he had not only met careless criteria but probably surpassed them and the the wonderful demonstration of this is his portrait of his teacher in 1879 which was both the kind of valediction to his four years of training and I think a statement of competition for the future because he not only learned careless Duran's lessons but goes on in fact to outstrip careless [Music] Spanish music was being performed in concerts at the Parisian concert halls the Opera comedy and probably given a fashionable gloss when performed in Paris so that would have introduced sergeant to a kind of landscape of Spanish cultural possibilities Carlos Duran had urged his students to study the Spanish masters in 1879 while on a visit to Spain Sargent was struck by the realism of velázquez and Goya and began work on a very large canvas l Jaleo translates as ruckus or upper hall using it as a title sergeant drew attention to the sound that emanates from his masterwork the stamping heels of the dancer and the cries of encouragement from the unseen audience there's a kind of haunting even tragic quality to the kind of fury and impassioned emotion of an accomplished gypsy flamenco dancer in the flesh the light falls exclusively on her her satin skirt and long trade the dark shawl that she flings around her and he carefully drags his brush to articulate the tendrils of the fringes as they fill the air around her whirling figure the way in which he painted L Jaleo clearly positioned him within the more liberal and avant-garde end of artistic accomplishment at the time in Paris well hello is the picture of the year 1882 he's seen as a superstar and that again is unusual for a foreigner you know it was the French were other chauvinistic with a success of Elle Jaleo came occurring demand for portraits now the young artist had to consider his client's desires in addition to his own vision the balance he found difficult to maintain his daring composition of the daughters of Edward Dali Boyd confused critics one of whom referred to it as four corners and avoid however Henry James who would become a close friend understood the treatment is eminently unconventional and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of the figures in the foreground the light the free security of the execution the sense it gives us of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge of playing together all this makes the picture an astonishing work on the part of a young man of 26 when was a pinafore painted with that power and made so poetic [Music] costume was as important to sergeant as composition he dressed the diabolically handsome doctor policy in a deep red robe and posed him in a theatrical setting possibly bedroom reflecting his clients reputation for vanity and romantic escapades [Music] pottsy's many lovers are said to have included actress Sarah Bernhardt and the tantalizing madam good throw she was a native of Louisiana brought to Paris by her mother when her father died in the Civil War her odd beauty in natural grace attracted attention she married well and as madame Quatro she became a celebrity in Parisian society and the constant subject of rumor and speculation while visiting her family home in Brittany Sargent sketched her in preparation for a much larger painting one that would change the course of his life he wrote to Vernon Lee in a few days I shall be tackling the portrait of a great beauty she has the most beautiful lines he sought her out wanted to paint her got mutual friends to arrange an introduction he worked very hard on developing that picture there are a number of oil sketches drawings in which he looked at her from different angles in different settings doing different things he saw as a representative of modern times the end result is an extraordinary distillation it's so simple it's just Madame axe was his seventh consecutive year showing at the salon ironically in an exhibition full of female nudes the clothes Madame X caused a scandal sergeant's friend Ralph Curtis reported yesterday the funeral of John sergeant he was very nervous but his fears were far exceeded by the facts Madame Cottrell and her mother made a fearful scene I fear he has never had such a blow most shocking was the strap which originally fell seductively from the subjects right shoulder until repainted back in place by a chastened sergeant it bombs partly because it is so extreme in its statement the out turned arm the black sheath like dress this was an insolent woman insolently displaying her beauty in a highly erotic way and it was an insolent work of art [Music] sajin did overplayed his hand what Commission's there were dried up the call of friend and Anglophile Henry James lured him to England and a fresh start young John Sergeant has high talent a charming nature artistic and personal and is civilized to his fingertips I take a great interest in him and a very desirous to witness his future Henry James there is perhaps more chance for me in London as a portrait painter although it might be a long struggle for my painting to be accepted it is not beastly French it was the 1880s the first skyscraper 10 storeys high was completed in Chicago an underground train system opened in London and kaiser wilhelm ii ascended the german throne anxious to challenge the power of the vast british empire in england sargent joined the artists and writers who gathered in the village of broadway in the Cotswolds he began again to explore the theories of Impressionism [Music] [Music] so Edmund Gosse a Broadway regular remembered sergeants work in the fields he was accustomed to emerge carrying a large easel to advance a little way into the open and then suddenly to plant himself down no one in particular behind a barn opposite a wall in the middle of a field the process was like that in the game of musical chairs where the player has to stop dead wherever he may happen to be directly the piano stops playing his object was to acquire the habit of reproducing precisely whatever met his vision in those days this was a revolutionary doctorate you see the wonderful picture of the Lu painting pool Lu with the bony knees and his wife looking thoroughly bored the background is swept he and his great weeds but he absolutely got Lu [Music] [Music] sergeant continued to visit colleagues in France once capturing his old friend Claude Monet at work in the woods near Giovanni [Music] you [Music] indoors sergeant is no less daring continuing to push beyond the traditional rules of composition upon his commission to paint for Vickers family he wrote to Vernon Lee I am to paint several portraits in the country and three ugly young women at Sheffield [Music] his portrait of the mrs. Vickers with its unbalanced use of space the very unusual downcast eyes of its central figure received good reviews in France but was thoroughly penned by the English Royal Academy the Pall Mall Gazette voted it the worst picture of 1886 [Music] determined to win out over what he perceived to be English prejudice Sargeant jumped at the opportunity to paint author Robert Louis Stevenson whom he called the most intense creature he had ever met Stevenson described Sargent as a charming simple clever honest young man he wrote to friends Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining room in my own Velveteen jacket and twisting as I go my own mustache it is I think excellent but is too eccentric to be exhibited I am at one extreme corner my wife in this wild dress and looking like a ghost is at the extreme other end all this is touched and lovely with that witty touch of sergeants but of course it looks damn queer as a whole Robert Louis Stevenson [Music] never confined to portraits alone Sargent continued working on outdoor figure paintings a specific event at Broadway had caught his eye I'm trying to paint a charming thing I saw the other evening two little girls in a garden at twilight lighting paper lanterns among the flowers from Rose tree to Rose tree I have two good little models I shall be a long time about it if I don't give up in despair the progress of the picture was a matter of excited interest to the whole of our little artist colony at the exact moment which of course came a minute or two earlier each evening the painter was accompanied to the scene of his labors at a certain notation of the light he ran forward planting rapid dabs of paint and then retiring again only with equal suddenness to repeat the wagtail action all this occupied but two or three minutes the light rapidly declining and then sergeant would join us again in a last turn at lawn tennis Edmund Gosse capturing this Twilight moment occupied many months sergeant pushed on past the summer growing season now my garden is a morass my Rose trees black weeds with flowers tied on from a friends hat and Ulster's protruding from under my children's white pinafores I wish I could do it with the right lighting in the right season it is the most extraordinary sight [Music] carnation Lily Lily Rose was a popular success of the Royal Academy in 1887 but some English critics were still not ready to embrace sergeant his work had a sense of immediacy that smacked too much of French Impressionism for conservative English tastes however when sergeant made his first professional visit to the United States that same year his reputation as a European artist made him an instant success sergeant came to America first walked Boston and he was really mobbed everybody wanted to be painted by him he had quite powerful backing from people like McKim Mead and white who prominent architects and of course Sargent porches look terrific in the context of there's sort of houses used returning prodigy but he represented European high style [Music] in London mutual friend Henry James had introduced sergeant to Isabella Stewart Gardner a leader in Boston Society she like sergeant was well-traveled well-educated and sophisticated she represented for sergeant a figure of accomplishment and he represented for her an artist of accomplishment and also a cultural personality of American extraction who epitomized the kind of taste and breadth of cultural awareness that she herself acquired in her lifetime she Commission's a full-length portrait from him in keeping with his and mrs. Gardiner's penchant for the exotic sergeant placed his friend in front of a 16th century Italian brocade letting it form a halo around her Henry James referred to the work as a Byzantine Madonna mr. Gardner was less pleased his reporter to have said to his wife it looks like hell but it looks like you it shows off her figure possibly a little bit too conspicuously her husband decreed that the portrait would never be shown publicly again during his lifetime and his wife apparently agreed with him and honored his wishes and it wasn't the friendship survived into old age bringing the opportunity for another very different kind of portrait at the end of her life in 1922 during one of these visits where he's allowed still to come and have tea with her and just chitchat for a while and so on she's not bedridden but she's spends most of her time on a kind of sofa and not too many people see her and he asked to paint her and she consents she makes an exception because she's obviously not in a situation where one would want a likeness to be taken and he does it as a watercolor she swaddled and what apparently was a white blanket but he makes look like a Moroccan robe and he endowed her with the spirit of a kind of wise even prophetic dignified mature personality which is of course exactly what she was [Music] meeting 87 on sergeant would periodically travel throughout America painting newly on commission the nation's most prominent men and women including Boston philanthropists Henry Lee Higginson [Music] in frederick law olmsted the landscape architect responsible for New York Central Park posing in the gardens he designed with the Vanderbilt mansion [Music] during an extended stay in Florida sargent agreed to paint patriarch john d rockefeller Here I am and temperature like a Turkish bath about to begin work on the old gentleman who looks like a medieval saved [Music] sergeant's immense popularity and his friendship with influential architects Charles McKim and Stanford White brought a new challenge the opportunity to create murals for two of Boston's most prominent buildings he considered such an offer one of the highest honors an artist could receive but he could not foresee the controversy who would cause for the Boston Public Library sergeant chose to illustrate the progress of religion he traveled extensively through Egypt Greece and the Middle East to gain inspiration for symbolizing early pagan beliefs [Music] his first murals were well-received but his two symbols of Christian and Judaic traditions caused a scandal Sargeant personified synagogue has a tragic figure blindfolded and shrouded in the veil of the temple church on the other hand was portrayed as powerful triumphant and distant he intended to unify the images with a central panel of Christ preaching early viewers of synagogue however were quick to denounce sergeant as anti-semitic surprised he denied the charge who tried to explain his choice of imagery ultimately he retreated from the controversy and the project the central panel remains blank [Music] while working on the library project sergeant had accepted the additional task of creating murals for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts the museum's murals are really a wonderful decorative ensemble populated with figures from classical mythology and there are a lot of individual stories told in the different pictures but in total what they talk about are the sanctity of the arts particularly the visual arts and the museum's role as the guardian of culture so it's a really a celebration of the museum its contents and its mission the trustees originally suggested that Sargent decorate three little lunettes and he said well I have bigger ideas and proposed that they cover over the entire dome to make spaces for his paintings and sculpture they agreed when the murals were unveiled here the press went crazy people flocked to see them they were a tremendous success it's a classical building and so it was inevitable that he chose to illustrate a number of scenes from classical mythology so in some of the murals you see stories such as Hercules in the Hydra or Perseus cutting off Medusa's head stories of that sort these are giant paintings some of them weren't done in Boston some of them were done in London so they were transported from Sargent studio unrolled here and held in place with giant wooden supports until the glue was able to dry I don't think it makes sense to look at each individual painting and try to assess it as a specific work of art that's not how Sargent meant you to see them he meant you to see them as a totality a great decorative ensemble and viewed that way they're spectacular sergeant worked on the Boston murals over a period of thirty years all the while pursuing his career painting portraits landscapes and figures the enormous success of his initial visit to America in 1887 made him all the more popular upon returning to London [Music] clients like LZ Palmer a resident of England but also daughter of the man who founded Colorado Springs help sergeant bring his American success home to England [Music] he asked to paint the celebrated English actress Ellen Terry terry has just come out as Lady Macbeth and looks magnificent but she has not yet made up her mind to let me paint her in one of the dresses until she is quite convinced she is a success from a pictorial point of view there can be no doubt about it magenta hair [Music] Nady 93 sergeants portrait of Lady Avenue of Locke nor were shown at the Royal Academy was hailed by the times as the finest example of portraiture that has been seen here for a long time while mr. Sargent has abandoned none of his subtlety he has abandoned his mannerisms and has been content to make a beautiful picture of a charming subject he had come a long way since the dismissal of the mrs. Vickers as the worst picture of 1886 it's a more flamboyant age his pictures I think are just so stylish and so alive and so brilliantly painted unlike other pictures with a rather flat backgrounds rather stylized kind of images rather working in sort of dull Browns and all of that he has Sargent taking it all apart [Music] his career took off he was inundated with an international demand for his portraits painted 20 in 10 months alone [Music] people describe him in the in the studio he wore out the copied day back and forth from the easel looking at the person and back and then for standing away then rushing in routing demons demons and and sort of suppressed so you have to think of him as I think of his over kettle constantly on the boil Henry James wrote to fellow author Edith Wharton I am to sit tomorrow to sergeant for the third time I have an impression that he may make a fresh start if he does he will probably over the known that learned ground go much straighter but he may pick himself or me up and - so long as it is Gretchen Fisk Warren of Boston was an intellectual who had declined professorships at Wellesley and Radcliffe was not afraid to argue with sergeant about how she would be portrayed she wanted to be seen in somber green velvet the pur fitted her temperament sergeant insisted on a more feminine gown the artist one dressing his client in a gown borrowed at the last moment from her sister-in-law [Music] he asked the paint Thomas Lister the 4th Baron Ribblesdale the epitome of the Edwardian eras Tikrit sergeant portrays him in his buff hunting outfit or the riding crop and Chesterfield overcoat of the painting Lord Ribblesdale author of stag hunting recollection said it has forced a greatness upon me which is quite embarrassing he was criticized for just painting costume but he did paint costume he did paint dresses he did paint suit he chose them because he realized that the clothes were part of a meaning an a was slurred their God they all were very keenly concerned with costume and and there is nothing the more more current more timely Mortimer time-bound nothing that speaks of a particular moment as clearly as fashion it was a new century Peter Pan's sword for the first time of a London and the Wright brothers flew over the dunes of Kitty Hawk in Japan the Russian fleet was destroyed laying the seeds for revolution change was in the air Sargent was internationally acclaimed as the portraitist of the time but in 1903 he began to shift away from portraiture allowing a public exhibition of his landscapes and figure paintings [Music] in 1907 a year after his mother's death sergeant completed a rare self-portrait saying I have long been sick and tired of portrait painting and when I was pleading my own mug I firmly decided to devote myself to other branches of art [Music] he shocked the Outworld announcing no more portraits by the boar and Abdullah man hope never to do another especially in the upper classes above all I must get abroad see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen the power of selection will follow [Music] Venice's always was a welcomed refuge and sergeant captured its character in both oils and watercolors what comes of course are very mobile and is very easy to paint because you don't have to set up the easel and it's much simpler and he just responds to the light and color and activity in Italy in a very spontaneous free style it's often a view from the gondola and it's just a fragment something is caught its attention but he's very often cropping pictures as a photographer would do his landscapes so radically different in style and subject from his portraits confused the critics yet again many could not accept sergeant's drastic career change critic Roger Fry led the attack saying frankly we like mr. Sargent better on parade at the Academy for here we see alas mr. Sargent when he goes to Venice reacts to the new surroundings for all the world like an ordinary tourist the more sympathetic critic wrote why the most fashionable portrait painter of the time should give up the work that brought him fame while still in the possession of health and eyesight he's a subject that gossip would love to feed upon in any age but gossip this once was thwarted gossip can do nothing with the silent sergeant in a letter to a patron sergeant did once confess very few writers give me credit for insides so to speak he was known for his shyness and kept his private life private he never married and his personal life reveals no romantic liaisons creating some conjecture well there has been talk recently about sergeant sexuality as possible homosexuality some people feel that there's simply not enough evidence for it to to talk seriously about it there are drawings by sergeant and have a distinct homoerotic character does it affect his art I don't think if it's so that it's the key to sergeant's are that that unlocks dimensions of it that that we haven't seen before maybe sergeant's insistence on privacy is his secrecy is his protection of his private life has may be explained by that he felt very deeply that he was endowed with a special gift and that he felt a deep-seated responsibility to use that gift to its fullest and this drove him through the relatively long career that he had sergeant was an artistic Nomad constantly painting that which caught his eye [Music] he travels religiously and habitually every summer to a number of the same spots that he had first visited as a young boy and he generally takes with him a group of close friends often included were other artists such as ambrosia Rafael with whom Sargent enjoyed comparing techniques he took great delight in portraying the daily activities of his friends [Music] companion gender Glen wrote to her mother yesterday I spent all day posing in Turkish cross she mooned the mossy banks of the brook he has stacks of lovely oriental clothes and dresses anyone he could get in them [Music] is interested in views that are unique to him the Swiss Alps the Canadian Rockies Boston are Paul stops on his constantly evolving personal itinerary as he goes along they endure what we would consider to be hard physical hardship in order to do it they camp out in in remote locations and mountain lodges and things of that kind while in the Alps have captured the stock mountain sunlight on the white gowns of his favorite niece where's Marie Ormonde and her friend in his painting the repose rosemarie appeared again causing one critic to declare mr. sergeant while pretending to be occupied with pose and distribution of drapery has given us one of those delightful representations of femininity [Music] another nice Reina ormond posed for all seven figures of the mysterious and soulful painting cashmere [Music] sergeant and his friends continued their travels and their work unaware that their world was coming to an end on June the 28th 1914 the Archduke Ferdinand heir to Austria and Hungary was assassinated in Bosnia the precarious balance of European power collapsed war was declared in Sargent returned to England apparently unconcerned by the hostilities proceeded to America to install his murals and to sketch the Rockies it raining and snowing my tent flooded mushrooms sprouting in my boots porcupines taking shelter my clothes canned food always fried in a black frying pan getting on my nerves and a fine waterfall which was the attraction to the place pounding and thundering all night the war came home to sergeant at last in its final year in March 1918 his niece Rosemarie was attending a concert at San Java in Paris when a German bomb struck [Music] she and 70 others were killed that June Sargeant accepted a commission from the British government to be an official war artist I shall feel tempted to go out and have a look at it but would I have the nerve to look not to speak of painting I've never seen anything the least horrible outside of my studio [Music] he was totally unfamiliar with a military campaign he once said to a general I suppose there is no fighting on Sundays but he did not hang back and at 62 years old chose to travel to the very center of the conflict the Western Front he lived in a dugout for a time he went to the trenches and witnessed that kind of aspect of the war he sought out a kind of grassroots hands-on and probably at times rather dangerous direct experience of what it was like to be fighting Sodom was placed in a field hospital while recovering from a bout of influenza in a hospital tent where the accompaniment of drones have wounded in the choking and coughing of gassed men which was a nightmare it always seems strange on opening one's eyes to see the level cots and dimly lit long tent looking so calm when one was dozing in pandemonium his charge was to celebrate on canvas the Union of British and American forces for a proposed War Memorial the project is set heavily on me for the naked eye cannot catch it in the act nor have I so far forged the Balkans net in which the act can be imprisoned and gaily looked upon I've only seen three fine subjects with masses of soldiers one a harrowing sight a field full of gassed and blindfolded men it was not the glory of war nor its decorated officers but rather the image of enlisted men blinded by mustard gas that inspired one of his greatest works [Music] sargent may have been innocent when he went into the war but certainly he seems to have lost his innocence when it came to painting that picture [Music] [Music] he chose to show us this grow of soldiers this this frieze of figures [Music] it's a classical frieze which things have gone horribly roll along and these soldiers are stumbling blind towards what end is it towards healing is it salvation is a very spiritual picture the guy ropes is a very dominant on the right there look tremendously like the guy ropes in to Drita's crucifixion of the press being raised cast is physically a huge picture it was very emphatically a public picture when you stand close to the picture you're in there with a jumble of figures in the foreground making the experience all the more intense all the more intimate who else has ever expressed the tragedy of war as he has done in his group of gassed soldiers its horror conveyed without contortion or grimace and Wars tragedy assigned a subordinate and transitory place in the order of things by that peaceful landscape in the game of football in a middle distance while for the emotions of the beholder it is terrible like a chapter of Tolstoy Vernon Lee sajin completed the work in his studio only months after the war ended [Music] new winds are blowing there's a new political climate the lifestyle that went with the kind of glamorous Anglo American society that sergeant of course immortalized in a portrait in his portraits has been said to have been gone forever and I think that's true the science of those aristocratic families that Sargent painted were lost in the trenches in France one could hardly exaggerate I think the fact that a certain kind of lifestyle the Edwardian lifestyle if you will was annihilated with the advent of the First World War [Music] by the end of his career john singer sargent become the most prolific american painter of the 19th century he had painted over 800 portraits and over 1800 landscapes and bigger paintings [Music] on April the 14th 1925 John enjoyed an intimate dinner party hosted by his sister Emily they celebrated the completion of his decades of work for the Museum of Fine Arts final murals had been rolled and packed that afternoon ready to sail with their creator to Boston a tired sergeant quipped now the American things are done and so I suppose and may die when I like [Music] he was found the next morning his class is pushed up on his forehead were cops your Voltaire's dictionary philosophy open beside him he had died in his sleep although still loved by many sergeants work rapidly fell out of fashion in the new post-war world the emergence of modernism and abstract painting quickly overshadowed his legacy within a few years of his death he was no longer taken seriously dismissed as a mere society painter when I studied the history of art when sergeant was at issue who was held up as an example really of almost everything that was wrong with art he was superficially it was just concerned with fashion he only painted pretty people and so on what I think we now begin to see over and over and over again is that this simply isn't true or if he did if he was concerned with with dress with costume with his fashion that was a very deliberate and and a significant part of his art we also I think begin to see that Sargent is not at all superficial that his paintings are often charged with psychological meaning [Music] the inscription on sergeant's tombstone in Latin reads labradori as or doubting or to work is to pray it refers obviously to his industriousness his indefatigable 'ti his physical vigor to work is to pray suggests of course that his industriousness was also a form of spirituality [Music] pree sergeant painting and life were inseparable from early youth with his mother's encouragement he had worked every day of his life he had reached the pinnacle of artistic success on both sides of the Atlantic he had travelled the world he had witnessed the glitter of high society and the deep horrors of the battlefield and all of it he captured on canvas more and more it has seemed to me that sergeant's life was absorbed in his painting and the summing up of a would-be biographer must I think be he painted [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] john singer sargent outside the frame is made possible by a generous grant from the Eugene B casey foundation