{"product_id":"f-jennings-kate-john-singer-sargent-9781572153417","title":"John Singer Sargent","description":"The novelist Henry James once said about his friend John Singer Sargent that even while still in his twenties he presented the alarming spectacle of a painter who seemed to have nothing more to learn. To this day Sargent is regarded as the greatest virtuoso of the paintbrush in the history of American art. He could, with almost offhand ease, find brilliant solutions to problems in composition, modelling and rendering that would have overwhelmed other artists, and his draftsmanship was so sure that he seldom bothered even to make the usual preliminary pencil or charcoal sketches on his canvasses, relying on his paintbrush alone to do whatever drawing was necessary. That Sargent elected to devote these prodigious talents largely to elegant society portraiture both assured his worldly success and severely damaged his reputation in many influential art circles. On the one hand, he was lionized by his society patrons: England’s Edward VII even offered him a knighthood if only he would renounce his American citizenship (an offer Sergent politely declined). And he was equally celebrated in the world of academic art: in one year alone, 1897, he was elected to the National Academy in New York and the Royal Academy in London and was made an officer of the Légion d’Honneur in Paris. But other artists and critics – especially those associated with the burgeoning Impressionist movement – denounced him for having made a contemptible “bourgeois compromise” and dismissed his dazzling artistic gifts as mere technique, a showy surface masking a fundamental shallowness. For many years after Sargent’s death in 1925, this latter, negative assessment predominated, but in recent years, critics and art historians have begun to revaluate his work more objectively, wondering if a painting proficiency so extraordinary might not finally be its own justification, if Sargent may not, after all, have been the American Joshua Reynolds, or even the American Velázques.","brand":"Jg Press; World Publications Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53825137803606,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/f-jennings-kate-john-singer-sargent-9781572153417","provider":"momoxbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}