Customer Reviews

Sargent Paintings Cards (Card Books)

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The name of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is among the first that comes to an art lover's mind at the mention of "portrait artist." Indeed, Sargent was the most famous portrait artist of his time, the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras. His oil-on-canvas likenesses of members of New York's and London's high societies are both opulently beautiful - typical souvenirs of the Gilded Age - and sharply naturalistic.

SARGENT PAINTINGS contains twenty-four vividly printed art cards. Among the portraits reproduced are LADY AGNEW OF LOCHNAW (the seated subject of which has an opalescent gown and an arresting gaze), DR. POZZI AT HOME (whose subject wears a brilliant red dressing gown), THE MISSES VICKERS (a posed scene of upper-class Victorian domesticity), VIOLET SARGENT (one of two paintings Sargent made of his sister), the almost Impressionistic PAUL HELLEU SKETCHING WITH HIS WIFE, Sargent's self-portrait, and ENA AND BETTY, DAUGHTERS OF ASHER WERTHEIMER (perhaps the best known in a series of portraits Sargent painted of the members of a wealthy London family of Jewish descent). My personal favorite of the portraits is MISS HELEN DUNHAM, which shows a lovely young sitter wearing a shining white gown of almost Classical simplicity and sitting against a sumptuous, ruby red backdrop. The non-portraits included are OYSTER GATHERERS OF CANCALE and TWO WOMEN ASLEEP IN A PUNT UNDER A WILLOW, both of them true examples of American Impressionism. Unfortunately, the book omits my two all-time favorite Sargent paintings: MISS ELLEN TERRY AS LADY MACBETH and REPOSE. But what is actually present could hardly be bettered.