![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sargent-The-Charcoal-Portraits-1.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nBy Trevor Fairbrother<\/p>\n
Quibbles aside, this book\u2019s profusion of illustrations is a windfall for artists, art students, and those keen on close looking and visual culture.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Book cover with detail of Lady Anne Innes-Ker (1911; private collection)<\/p>\n
Entries on 694 drawings<\/a> constitute the bulk of Richard Ormond\u2019s new book John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits<\/a> (Yale University Press, 407 pages, $80). In the words of the publisher, these works \u201ccapture the essence of British and American high society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, portraying an elite clientele that includes aristocracy, royalty, politicians, artists, writers, actors, financiers, and philanthropists.\u201d In his \u201cIntroduction,\u201d Ormond outlines the artist\u2019s studio practices and evolving stylistic interests. He also reviews period approaches to framing and explains why some works have yellowed over time.<\/p>\n Sargent typically finished a charcoal in one session lasting two to three hours. This differed drastically from the marathon of sittings necessary for a large oil portrait. He preferred a sheet of French handmade paper measuring approximately 24 by 18 inches. Most subjects face the viewer or present a slightly turned head. The image is slightly less than life-size. There were two options for the background: the empty brightness of the unmarked paper or bold strokes of charcoal that evoke shadowed space.<\/p>\n The artist\u2019s trademark virtuosity is evident in the portrait on the book jacket, Lady Anne Innes-Ker heavy black-on-black marks for the hair and the darkest areas; rapid confident lines for the striped textile; the faintest touches for the light tones of the face and the bow atop the hat; and crisp, gleaming highlights on the earring and blouse, produced by the scrupulous erasure of charcoal. Two portraits of actress Ruth Draper offer a comparison of these different background treatments. These drawings also show Sargent responding to the same person in very different scenarios. The first depicts Draper \u2013 a pert, quick-witted New Yorker \u2013 as one might encounter her at a social gathering. The second shows her in costume, impersonating an impoverished immigrant searching for her injured husband in a Manhattan hospital.<\/p>\n Flattery and fiction creep into professional portraiture because a client is paying for a service. The artist may try to dictate the costume and pose, or the sitter may prove demanding about the likeness. In short, the ambience of their brief time together is pivotal. How truthful, then, are the portraits Sargent made on commission? Someone\u2019s external appearance is conjured on canvas or paper, but each viewer will read the image subjectively, intuiting the character the sitter may have tried to present and grasping what the artist chose to picture.<\/p>\n A telling anecdote is connected with the charcoal of the Bostonian William Lawrence<\/a>. When donating it to a museum in 1975, the subject\u2019s son expressed disdain for Sargent\u2019s delineation of a \u201ccold, urbane\u201d bishop: \u201cNo one who ever knew and loved my father has ever liked the picture.\u201d Hugo Francis Charteris posed for his charcoal in a jacket and bow-tie, which the artist drew but then erased at the last minute in favor of an invented overcoat and evening scarf. Sargent insisted that his alteration improved the composition, and Charteris grudgingly accepted his fate: \u201cI look cynical, sly, severe, but very spry and alert.\u201d If the young aristocrat had not written those comments in a family letter, we would believe that the artist\u2019s image was true. And what about the work on the cover of this book? Did Sargent\u2019s rendering of the young American\u2019s stiff and cool demeanor hint at a calculating aplomb or emotional hardness? What did he feel as he drew her?<\/p>\n Ruth Draper (1913; private collection) and Ruth Draper in the Character of a Dalmatian Peasant (1914; Museum of the City of New York)<\/p>\n Ormond is apt to oversimplify the artist\u2019s biography in The Charcoal Portraits. He says that Sargent \u201cshut up shop\u201d as a portrait painter in 1907 and made a \u201cswitch of careers\u201d in favor of a large mural scheme destined for the Boston Public Library. He bases the claim on a letter in which the artist ridiculed his charcoals as \u201cmugs\u201d and his oil paintings as \u201cpaughtraits\u201d and declared himself sick of both lines of work. But the much-quoted phrase \u201cNo more paughtraits\u201d was surely an empty promise Sargent coined to amuse Ralph Curtis, the dear old friend who received the letter. In truth, his portrait shop remained open: he tried (with moderate success) to make fewer paintings while concurrently increasing his output of charcoals.<\/p>\n Sargent\u2019s ability to visualize individual character, social standing, and profession merits applause in the \u201cIntroduction.\u201d Ormond feels that the charcoals of aristocrats stand out from those that depict artists and intellectuals because the artist had an eye for \u201cthe marks of high breeding.\u201d The author\u2019s personal connections to Sargent and the Edwardian ruling class may have sharpened his opinions. His maternal grandfather was Sir Alexander Doran Gibbons of Stanwell Place, Middlesex. His paternal grandmother was Violet Sargent, the artist\u2019s younger sister, who married the scion of a wealthy Swiss business family, Francis Ormond. In 2001, Queen Elizabeth II appointed him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (\u201cFor Services to Museums\u201d).<\/p>\n It is disheartening that Ormond overlooks the fact that the artist never married, rarely acknowledging sitters who were part of a sexual minority. I found exceptions in the entries on two drawings: Olga, Baroness de Meyer (\u201csaid to have been bisexual\u201d) and Robert Gould Shaw III<\/a> (\u201ctroubled by his homosexuality, for which he spent time in prison\u201d). The topic of sexual orientation is relevant because Sargent\u2019s social status amongst Britain\u2019s ruling class was diminished on two scores: he was an American interloper, and he was a bachelor. His London career began at the moment when the government made homosexual behavior illegal. He fostered inscrutability by monitoring his public persona and guarding his private life. One advantage he possessed was to be characterized in the press as a daunting, masculine figure: he was bearded, corpulent, and very tall.<\/p>\n Sir Philip Sassoon, Bt (1912; Houghton Hall, Norfolk) and Sybil Sassoon (1912; private collection)<\/p>\n Sitters of Jewish ancestry or background are seldom identified in this book. Two exceptions are Boston rabbi Charles Fleischer and London pianist Myra Hess. Sir Philip Sassoon was both a Jew and a closeted homosexual, and Ormond relies on euphemisms to suggest those facts. Thus, Sargent admired the man\u2019s \u201cdark good looks and stylish, insouciant personality;\u201d Sassoon was \u201can aesthete of great sensibility\u201d and a person who \u201cdecorated his houses with exquisite taste.\u201d And he \u201cmade a name for himself as a social host,\u201d but his bachelor status goes unstated. The catalogue entry on the portrait of Philip\u2019s sister Sybil declares: \u201cSargent was fascinated by the Sassoon family, with their exotic looks, elegance, vitality and taste.\u201d<\/p>\n Socializing with the Sassoon siblings and the family of Asher and Flora Wertheimer gave Sargent much pleasure. The bonds between him and his Jewish patrons may have been strengthened by their individual experiences as outsiders. After the First World War, the artist witnessed an upsurge in British antisemitism and anti-immigration campaigns. In 1923, nine of his paintings of the Wertheimer family arrived at London\u2019s National Gallery at the bequest of Asher Wertheimer. A ruckus ensued; Parliament debated the donor\u2019s wish that the ensemble be hung permanently in one gallery. One malicious politician dismissed them as \u201cclever, but extremely repulsive, pictures\u201d that would constitute \u201ca chamber of horrors.\u201d (For the record, in her 2024 book Family Romance: Sargent and the Wertheimers,\u00a0 Jean Strouse compiled a list of the artist\u2019s Jewish sitters.)<\/p>\n In 1926, London\u2019s Royal Academy hung more than 60 Sargent charcoals in its massive memorial exhibition.<\/p>\n The scholarly apparatus for each item in the \u201cCatalogue\u201d consists of an image, physical data, provenance, and a brief descriptive text with an emphasis on lineage, marriage, and professional distinctions. The drawings are listed alphabetically by sitter. From an art-historical perspective, I would have arranged the entries chronologically. That tactic would have allowed one to parse the sequence of images for stylistic shifts and to consider the different batches that Sargent produced during various working visits to the U.S. (About a third of these portraits depict Americans.)<\/p>\n The \u201cCatalogue\u201d contains several drawings that do not conform to Sargent\u2019s usual formula for commissioned charcoals. Some are smaller in size. One is a quick impression of an interior with a man whose identity \u201cis not certain.\u201d Two are deathbed portraits, including King Edward VII. Some are studies rather than formal portraits. The latter group includes a head of Olimpio Fusco<\/a>, a man likely hired as a model for the mural work. Sargent did not sign the sheet, but he recorded the subject\u2019s name and street address. This work remained in the artist\u2019s personal collection along with a few analogous sketches inscribed with names and London addresses, which are excluded from The Charcoal Portraits excludes: one fine example shows Beatrice Stuart<\/a>.<\/p>\n Quibbles aside, this book\u2019s profusion of illustrations is a windfall for artists, art students, and those keen on close looking and visual culture. The publication also opens a window on a historical period. Someone embarking on a costume drama set in the rarefied social landscapes of Sargent\u2019s realm could not ask for a better primer.<\/p>\n Trevor Fairbrother is a curator and writer. He illustrated numerous examples of the charcoals in Sargent Portrait Drawings, an inexpensive book from Dover Publications that has been in print since 1983. His latest contributions to the Sargent merry-go-round are an essay and interview that supplement Donald Platt\u2019s Tender Voyeur, a collection of poems that meditate on the lush and sensual aspects of Sargent\u2019s work. Tender Voyeur is published by Grid Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Trevor Fairbrother Quibbles aside, this book\u2019s profusion of illustrations is a windfall for artists, art students, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59029,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[457,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-59028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59028"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59028\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Drayper.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Sassoon.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/catalogue.jpg\")
<\/p>\n