John Singer Sargent: Artistic Style & Methods

Sargent's handling was formed in Carolus-Duran's studio, where students were taught to model directly in paint rather than build a picture from a finished drawing, and it was sharpened in front of Velázquez at the Prado in 1879. The result was a technique of broad, loaded strokes laid down at speed. Contemporaries read it as bravura; the many preparatory sheets in this archive show how much planning stood behind it.

Drawing was constant. The Met's holdings include pages from boyhood sketchbooks of the 1860s and 1870s - glaciers, chalets, boats and studies of a seagull dated August 18, 1874 - while the National Gallery of Art's large group of Corcoran drawings, given in 1949 by the artist's sisters Emily Sargent and Violet (Mrs. Francis) Ormond, preserves the working studies for the murals: nude and draped figures in charcoal for the Boston Public Library's prophets, Rosary mysteries and Judgment, and for the classical gods of the Museum of Fine Arts. Many are drawn on both sides of the sheet, and the archive keeps rectos and versos as separate records.

Watercolour became his private medium once he stopped taking portrait commissions. Museum records for the Met's sheets list watercolour combined with graphite, gouache and wax crayon used as a resist, the wax keeping highlights white under washes of Venetian stone, Alpine snow or Florida palmettos. He worked outdoors and close to the motif, often cropping a doorway, a gondola mooring or a corner of a fountain rather than composing a panorama, and most of these sheets were neither exhibited nor sold in his lifetime. The charcoal "mugs" of his later decades, such as the 1916 portrait of the Right Reverend William Lawrence in this archive, applied the same economy to faces.