The Fountain
John Singer Sargent
JOHN SINGER SARGENT, 1907. OIL ON CANVAS.
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.