The Alpine Sketchbooks of John Singer Sargent: A Young Artist's Perspective [Paperback]

Stephen D. Rubin (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 47 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art (December 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870996347
• ISBN-13: 978-0870996344
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,557,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Young Sargent, Nature and / or Nurture, October 10, 2007

By 

Peter McReynolds (California U S) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Alpine Sketchbooks of John Singer Sargent: A Young Artist's Perspective (Paperback)

This is a short (45 page) oversize (9 inch by 11 inch) black and white paperback published in 1991 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's an exhibit catalog based on two 1870 sketchbooks restored at the Metropolitan. Sargent filled these as a 14-year-old on a three-week summer tramp through the Alps with his father. The works depicted appear to be in a variety of media: watercolor, graphite pencil and charcoal? Unfortunately for fully appreciating the watercolors, the reproductions are in black and white. There are several pages of informative text as well. As an aside, the author, researching the project, is said to have retraced the Sargents' intinerary through the mountains, proving that art scholarship is not always petty bickering over arcane marginalia of less and less relevance. Great work if you can get it!

Although these are not Sargent's earliest extant sketch books, they are efforts from a fourteen-year-old prior to any real formal and professional training in art. This claim is tenable, despite the stories of tutorial by Sargent's ever-at-her-easel mother, due the author's assessment of her own actual work. "The crude drawing style, incorrect perspective, and inept use of watercolor technique..." Well, perhaps she instilled a love of art, if not the concrete means to it. So these few works of little John Sargent offer interesting data on the timeline of his artistic development. And the book is worth it for this reason alone.

A neurophysiologist can tell you that the human eye is still developing, even physically at an age approaching six. That is, your four-year-old does not, cannot view the world as you do. The "hardware and software", the eye itself and the brain's use of the signals, is still not fully mature. And that is true whether your nature is such as to be ultimately 20-20 or sadly myopic. Similarly, if I remember Piaget correctly, the mean age for a human to properly understand the role of x-the-unknown in an algebra expression is twelve. Teaching college physics years ago, I could only politely remain silent when 20-year-old students would fault me with, "I can understand it when you have the sense to use real numbers like 12, instead of that x-the-unknown stuff!" A human reaching maturity is not simply a fully-formed vessel filling over the years with facts. Even the physical vessel is still finishing. Is this true in art as well?
For the sake of argument, assume that an artist develops in an analogous manner.
If so, in my opinion, the watercolors of the 14-year-old Sargent are already quite remarkable, mature, at least in black and white. Particularly "The Matterhorn from Zmutt Glacier, Zermatt". In fact, it is quite astonishing. The watercolors seem further advanced than do the linear media, pencil or charcoal, particularly the figures. That relative difficulty is particularly interesting, due even an infant's experimentally determined "expertise" at recognizing faces. At fourteen has the mind already firmly ensconced symbols for the objective reality, the usual problem in accurate rendition. And, does this thus require the 14-year-old extra effort to unlearn, to de-automate the seeing of people as opposed to scenes or objects? This opinion of course is only as regards a pleasing realism. As to the other elements of what constitutes art, how does all this this jibe with the view popularized in Betty Edward's books, that an adult attempting art is a ruined child? The adult obsessed with photo accuracy and devoid of fantasy? The free-flowing creativity of a child is silenced by the adult's drive to conformity, conformity as realism.
For those more interested in pursuing these topics, "American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art JOHN SINGER SARGENT", published by that institution in 2000, offers a very complete set of Sargent drawings and watercolors, including those from this period of his life. Therein one can see not just much more but also watercolors reproduced in color.

All in all, studying the book well repaid me, offered much food for thought about the development of a great artist and any artistic effort at all.