JOHN SINGER SARGENT

John Singer Sargent lived a life of two halves. The first was as a wildly successful portrait artist, amongst the greatest of his generation and celebrated across American high society, who’s inhabitants he most often depicted. He had a natural confidence with the brush, so sure in his hand that he commenced works without pencil sketches and his portraits captured a loose essence with Edwardian luxury, and occasional eroticism. The second was as a landscape artist, rejecting the grandiosity and traditionalism of his portraiture for painting en plein air in a far more impressionist style. 1907, when this work was painted during his travels around Italy, was the exact year of transition between these two movements. One can see in ‘The Fountain’ his internal conflict; the work is both portrait and landscape, painted outside of his friends and frequent travelling companions. They are an epitome of turn of the century decadent luxury and yet the landscape they exist in has a relaxed, definitively impressionist air - on a single canvas we see a collision between worlds, times, and Sargent’s split lives.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Continents collide, antiquity butts up against modernity, and a primal spirituality comes into conflict with an industrialised capitalism. The work of Jean-Michel Basquiat has been explored perhaps as much as any post-war artist, and yet the depth of imagery, allegory, and references in his work continues to reward deep looking. Like few others, he was able to synthesise ideas from different movements, epochs, and civilisations, bringing traditional African art, as visible here in the mask-like face that dominates the top right corner, with a sensibility developed from his time as a graffiti artist, which the tightly coordinated chaos of the composition speaks to, and underpin the entire thing with a profound understanding of art history. Every inch of the canvas of ‘The Melting Point of Snow’ is used deliberately, weaving a tapestry of biblical stories, themes of childhood, and contemporary culture. Through all of it exists a theme of healing, from the Ritalin trademarks and copyrighted drug names, to the description of the Eye of Horus and it’s benefits,  and the comforting stuffed toy labelled as non-toxic. The entirety of human history is fair game to Basquiat, and he manages to draw a line between disparate ideas in a single canvas that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

GIFFORD R. BEAL

Gifford Beal found inspiration up and down America’s east coast. A native New Yorker, every element of New England appealed to his painterly eye, and he found equal romance in the urban landscapes of Manhattan, the society scenes of Hudson Bay, and the rural, maritime life of Massachusetts and Provincetown. His journeys up and down the coast, staying in family estates and country houses, took him the the Caribbean, where the vibrant colors of the native art scene combined with his more rigorous, European inspired art education, which was the norm for the day. The results of this synthesis are works like ‘Fishermen’ which combine a rendering of light and form that speaks to Impressionism, capturing in the mind of the viewer an immediate feeling of the place and time of day, while using colours that are so bright and vibrant they seem all but unbelievable. The setting sun illuminates the fisherman as he balances in motion, casting him and the jib of his boat in a rich orange hue while the sky scream with an iridescent blue, moments away from fading into black. Beal’s scene is exquisitely balanced, in color and composition - rope lines dissect the landscape into organised thirds, and the horizon offers a solid ground for our fisherman to lean out onto. It is a work that seems so simple, yet displays mastery at every level.