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Title: Sargent Portrait Drawings: 42 Works by John Singer Sargent (Dover Art Library)
ISBN: 0486245241
Author:
John Singer Sargent
Publicate Date: 1983-08-01
Publish: 1983-08-01
List Price: $6.95
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $3.54
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.91
Amazon Merchant Price: $6.95
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Gifts for the artist
I selected this book as a gift for my husband. He was delighted to see the drawings of Sargent and is planning on developing his skills by copying the works found in the book.
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2: Great selected reference
This book is one of the best buys i did this year. Sargent paintings are very famous but the drawings from this little book are amazing! Some of these portraits were done in the later phase of Sargent work and show great mastery of the drawing media (pencil, charchoal). There's a small text about Sargent that is very good too.
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3: What would you expect from the master ?
A good book full of great drawings by one of the best artist I have ever studied. The price is right and you should not waist one more minute before you order it.
I always like to see how the great artist draw, since drawing is the back bone to good painting in my mind.
I really get a kick out of artist who say they can't draw and can only paint, sure.. Thats like saying you never learned to walk and that you can only run.
Sargent used to say you should draw every day and I think he was right.
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4: Sargent Portrait Drawings
The book is great. The ones who sent it didn't package it well. It is a paperback book and it came all bent up.
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5: A remarkable bargain!
A remarkable bargain and a must for anyone interested in John Singer Sargent or his work. An 8 by 11 inch, less than 50 page paperback. Published by Dover. B&W reproductions of 42 portrait sketches by Sargent. Mostly done in charcoal. Two long pages of lucid and informed, really excellent text by Trevor Fairbrother, author of books devoted to Sargent and several articles as well. The reproductions are competent, but, as always, can be nothing like the originals, one of which I've many times had the privilege of admiring in person. Although here again, any one familiar with works on paper has seen how even the interposition of the protective glass, sadly, visibly degrades the viewing.
The 42 sketches span a remarkable, interesting and even entertaining range. Arranged in almost chronological order, they stem from early in his career, but not his childhood, to near the end of his productive life, when he had almost entirely quit portraiture. Fairbrother skillfully has chosen an eclectic lot of Sargent subjects, well illustrating yet another facet of Sargent's personality. Although said shy unto retiring, Sargent must have liked people, at least the varied types of people. He certainly depicted all kinds. Here from a boy little more than an infant to the elderly and "important". The serious and the frivolous. Talented, self-made artists and performers to the witless-looking heirs and dismal aristocrats.
The book's incredible spectrum of people / types and Sargent's genius at capturing both their surface and their interior, can form the center of quite a game easily played today via the Internet. For example, the portrait of a friend of Sargent's, one Earnest Thesiger. From this sketch one infers quite a character, seeming a person perhaps of manic ebullience. The very amusing facts in his bio on the web's Wikipedia rather bears this out. One learns further that Thesiger was the nephew of General Frederic Augustus Thesiger, 2nd Baron Chelmsford, famously incompetent in needlessly losing his entire army in a massacre by the Zulus. (One can imagine a portrait of a dim and blimpy character here. Thankfully, nowadays the British select more professionals for their general officers.) Sargent's jolly Earnest Thesiger further was cousin to the famous Wifred Thesiger, author of the autobiography, "The Last Nomad". Wifred Thesiger was a war hero, diplomat, author, explorer and skilled photographer. Among his other accomplishments, the autobiography describes Wilfred's tireless toiling in the Sharm el Shatt (where the south of Iraq borders the south of Iran) to bring modern male circumcision to the primitive marsh Arabs. (A people so independent in their watery wilderness that the late Saddam Hussein ordered the draining of their protective confusion of still waters and bogs.) Well, odd as it might seem, Wilfred's medical procedures were clearly an improvement over the native's, I imagine especially over a ceremony for teenagers involving a low-banked fire built in a shallow sand pit. But, I digress.
However, that is the point, digressing from Sargent's wonderful portraits. What do they tell us; how can we follow up on our impressions? I'm returning to Fairbrother's book to select another sketch subject to mine for edification. I'm confident because Sargent has been described as having a large circle of interesting and talented friends. Except for those portraits of blimps.
Again, an excellent book at a very reasonable price.
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