Masters of Realism

John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, Anders Zorn, and their influence on realist painters today

By Norman Kolpas

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882, oil on canvas, 91 x 137, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (P7s1).

John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882, oil on canvas, 91 x 137, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (P7s1).

This story was featured in the July 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment,” observed early 20th-century Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla, “that painter was Velázquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.”

Sorolla, like so many painters working in the European realist traditions that ruled the world of western art until the 20th century, looked respectfully to past masters for technical guidance and aesthetic inspiration. Indeed, throughout most of art history, aspiring artists studied the works of those who had come before them. The ateliers in which they learned and refined their skills emphasized techniques and compositional styles developed by their forebears. And an artistic education routinely included visits to museums where canvases by past masters could be studied up close.

All that dedicated study of the past had changed quite a bit by the mid-20th century. Modern art movements like cubism and abstract expressionism strained ties with the past, and the works of the historical masters were often dismissed as mere illustration.

But in recent decades, masters from the last great heyday of realism have gained serious new regard from scholars and curators. And they have inspired countless artists who are part of the current resurgence of appreciation for realist art. Here we take a look at three such masters: John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Joaquín Sorolla. We also talk to three contemporary realist painters—Michelle Dunaway, Hiu Lai Chong, and Daniel Gerhartz—who are particularly inspired by the masters’ work.

John Singer Sargent, Carolus-Duran, 1879, oil on canvas, 46 x 38, Clark Art Institute, 1955.14.

John Singer Sargent, Carolus-Duran, 1879, oil on canvas, 46 x 38, Clark Art Institute, 1955.14.

John Singer Sargent: A Sensual Technician

Born to American parents but raised in Europe, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) became the most celebrated portraitist of his day, and his bold, mostly life-size, and often full-length figurative works endure today for their striking poses and compositions, evocative lighting, and bravura paint application. “His images present a vibrant, forceful realism while subtly projecting emotions, desires, and intuitions as their visual subtext,” observed critic Trevor Fairbrother in his book John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. “He jabbed, dabbed, smeared, slapped, and scratched his paint surfaces; he deployed brilliant, murky, flashy, peculiar, and ravishing colours.”

The early development of Sargent’s singular style came in large part through his expatriate parents. His father, an eye surgeon and adept medical illustrator, and his mother, an accomplished amateur painter, recognized the rambunctious boy’s talent at a young age and introduced him, in great museums across Europe, to masterpieces by the likes of Michelangelo, Titian, and Tintoretto. From his late teens to early 20s, he studied in the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris while also being mentored in the atelier of the respected young Parisian portraitist Carolus-Duran, who emphasized to his students the alla prima approach—painting spontaneously on the canvas directly from life, without the classical traditions of first executing careful compositional underpaintings
on the canvas.

At the age of 23, Sargent burst into the public eye, exhibiting a widely admired portrait of his teacher Carolus-Duran. Commissions soon followed, and one of them, his PORTRAIT OF MADAME X—a highly sensual depiction of a pale-skinned young socialite in a bare-shouldered, cleavage-revealing black gown—created such a scandal that he eventually decamped to London. That city became the celebrated painter’s home for the rest of his life, his base for creating images of illustrious Britons and Americans, including presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. After turning 51, however, he closed his London studio and devoted the final 18 years of his life largely to watercolors inspired by his travels in Britain, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, as well as murals inside Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Public Library and Harvard’s Widener Library. The past three decades have seen major international museum retrospectives of Sargent’s work, and today he is widely considered a virtuoso talent.

Michelle Dunaway, Her Mother’s Locket, oil, 20 x 16.

Michelle Dunaway, Her Mother’s Locket, oil, 20 x 16.

That virtuosity captivated 43-year-old Albuquerque-based portraitist Michelle Dunaway when she first encountered portraits by Sargent in the American wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as a young sculpture student in her early 20s. “Across the room, you’d feel like you were looking at a real person,” she remembers. “But up close, they awoke the technician in me with their fluid brushwork and color notes.”

In 2013, Dunaway experienced a particular closeness to Sargent’s portrait of MRS. EDWARD DARLEY BOIT in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. “They let me do a study from life of the hands in the portrait,” she says. “I learned so much from Sargent about color mixtures, design, and composition.”

Daniel F. Gerhartz, a 51-year-old figurative painter in Kewaskum, WI, drew similar inspiration from Sargent’s EL JALEO in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The large, moody oil of a gypsy dancer, he says, “has always haunted me. The composition is so strong, just an abstract light-and-dark pattern that directs your eye exactly where he wants it to go.” Gerhartz particularly seeks to emulate Sargent’s “ability to capture tone, his mastery of value control, and his color temperatures,” he says. “He was just head and shoulders above most artists of his day.”

Anders Zorn, Emma Zorn, Läsande, 1887, oil, 16 x 24, Zorn Collections, Mora, Sweden.

Anders Zorn, Emma Zorn, Läsande, 1887, oil, 16 x 24, Zorn Collections, Mora, Sweden.

Anders Zorn: A Nuanced Palette

Compared to Sargent’s present renown, the name Anders Zorn (1860-1920) is decidedly less familiar. But late-19th-century socialites and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic who vied for portraits by leading painters of the era (Zorn worked in Paris for many years, and made seven trips to the United States) deemed the Swedish artist a rival of the American’s. The two men were even once pitched directly in competition by American railway tycoon Edward Rathbone Bacon, who in 1897 challenged Zorn to paint a better portrait of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon, than the one Sargent had recently completed. Zorn later proudly recounted that when Sargent viewed the Swede’s rendition at that year’s Paris Salon, he admitted Zorn had “won a brilliant victory.”

As that self-aggrandizing anecdote might suggest, Zorn may have felt overshadowed by his contemporary’s greater acclaim. But in his heyday, the Swede had little reason to feel anything like a second-tier talent. Raised on a farm, he went on to become a teen prodigy at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. Known at first for his luminous watercolor works, he began to gain portrait commissions for Swedish socialites. Demand for Zorn portraits grew even greater when he began to master oils. His works won acclaim in Paris, where he and his wife, Emma, lived for eight years. Soon members of the international elite were clamoring for portraits by Zorn, captivated by his ability to capture not just the likenesses but also the personalities of his subjects, which included Sweden’s King Oscar II and Queen Sophia, and U.S. presidents Taft, Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Apart from those brilliantly executed but still fairly conventional works, Zorn continued to set himself technical challenges. Fascinated with light, the artist launched into extensive works in oil that explored the nude female figure in a watery outdoor setting and others depicting figurative scenes presented with dramatic contrasts of bright light and deep shadow. Even more than Zorn’s portraits, these genre paintings continue to be studied by scholars and admired by artists at work today.

Hiu Lai Chong, Sunset Race, oil, 24 x 24.

Hiu Lai Chong, Sunset Race, oil, 24 x 24.

They certainly fascinate and inspire Hiu Lai Chong, a 40-year-old landscape and figurative artist based in Rockville, MD. “Zorn often used a limited palette, with black and white and red and yellow ochre, which can create beautiful harmony in a painting,” she says. Gerhartz agrees, noting that Zorn’s ability to model the form with so few colors “challenges me to paint with less rather than more color to see what nuance and subtlety you can gain.” He especially recalls being impressed by Zorn’s SELF-PORTRAIT WITH MODEL and by his portrait of the French writer and actor COQUELIN CADET.

Just as eye-opening for artists working today is Zorn’s often boldly asymmetric approach to composition and design. Dunaway says she’s particularly taken with the portrait EMMA ZORN, LÄSANDE, a domestic scene in which the artist’s wife casually reads the newspaper, which occupies as much of the canvas as does her figure. “I love the rhythmical elements of the newspaper that bring your eye up to her face. It feels like you’re getting to witness a transitory moment in time. That’s something I try to capture in my work as well,” Dunaway says.

Chong also finds inspiration in Zorn’s dramatic placement of figures in a scene, as in his painting VALSEN, which depicts a formally dressed couple at a ball waltzing on the borderline between a shadowy anteroom and a brightly lit grand salon. “His sense of movement is just amazing,” Chong says.

Joaquin Sorolla, La Playa de Valencian (The Beach at Valencia), 1908, oil, 20 x 26.

Joaquin Sorolla, La Playa de Valencian (The Beach at Valencia), 1908, oil, 20 x 26.

Joaquín Sorolla: A Grand-Scale Colorist

In the early years of the 20th century, Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923) was the world’s most celebrated living Spanish artist, a renown that was eclipsed with the rise, just before World War I, of a modernist upstart named Pablo Picasso. Born in the eastern coastal town of Valencia, Sorolla was raised by his aunt and uncle, who saw to it that the talented youngster received training from local painters. At 18, he moved to Madrid, studying masters like Velázquez and Goya in the Prado; after completing military service at age 22, he won a four-year scholarship to the Spanish Academy in Rome.

Sorolla first gained major recognition at 29 with his painting ANOTHER MARGUERITE, depicting a fallen woman, handcuffed and seated on a bench while two constables stand watch. The subject spoke to modern times, but the somber palette and assured rendering evoked past Spanish greats, and the painting won a gold medal at the National Exhibition in Madrid, then garnered first prize at the Chicago International Exhibition. Soon Sorolla was being heralded in Paris, London, New York, and other art capitals. He traveled extensively throughout the United States, holding major shows and executing elite commissions, including an official portrait of President William Howard Taft.

The aspect of Sorolla’s work that garnered the most attention was his radiant use of color. “Nature, the sun itself, produces color effects instantaneously,” he observed. “The impression of these evanescent visions is what we make desperate attempts to catch and fix by any means at hand.” The sense of spontaneity embodied in that statement may have led some critics and observers, past and present, to label Sorolla an Impressionist; but his composition and faithful rendering remained very much those of a realist.

Sorolla’s passion for sunlight led him to paint not only landscapes and townscapes but also outdoor portraits—particularly images of his wife and daughters—with a casual air belying his classical training. His rigorous technique served him particularly well as he undertook more ambitious projects, including grandly scaled paintings that found their apex in a project completed shortly before his death: 14 giant murals, totaling 227 feet in length, depicting life in Spain’s provinces for the walls of a grand room in the Hispanic Society of America in Manhattan.

Daniel Gerhartz, In the Company of Kids, oil, 30 x 48.

Daniel Gerhartz, In the Company of Kids, oil, 30 x 48.

Sorolla’s methods continue to inspire realist artists working today. “He knew how to make his colors sing, sometimes using beautiful grays and blues to make brighter colors pop out even more,” says Chong. Adds Dunaway, noting her fondness for LA BATA ROSA, Sorolla’s painting of a young woman being helped into a rose-colored robe for bathing at the beach: “He would really play color temperatures against each other, capturing the effect of sunlight, how it falls and cascades across a subject.” Similarly, Gerhartz admires SEWING THE SAIL, noting that “light just blasts off the canvas. It’s almost as if you have to wear sunscreen to look at it.”

Gerhartz, Dunaway, and Chong have also found inspiration in the grand scale of so many Sorolla works. All three note the impact they felt upon witnessing his larger canvases. “I remember coming home being inspired to work on a way bigger scale and see what happens,” says Gerhartz.

Dunaway also drew another lesson from Sorolla’s images of his homeland. “As much as he painted grand subject matter, he would also paint the people and places that affected him personally. That really inspired me to want to paint those that I know and love.”

Daniel Gerhartz, A Golden Moment, oil, 36 x 48.

Daniel Gerhartz, A Golden Moment, oil, 36 x 48.

Dunaway, Chong, and Gerhartz: Forging Their Own Paths

As much as Dunaway, Chong, and Gerhartz credit the knowledge and inspiration they derive from past masters like Sargent, Zorn, and Sorolla, each artist’s work stands on its own. Dunaway’s recent portrait of her mentor and friend RICHARD SCHMID, for example, may evoke a lesson learned from Sorolla’s subject matter, but it also shows the present-day artist’s own warmly atmospheric use of color and brushwork. Chong’s CITY HALL FOUNTAIN certainly owes some of its rendering of watery spray to Sargent’s landscapes and cityscapes, but it also possesses the sure, serene sense of place the Chinese-born artist has achieved in her adopted homeland. And Gerhartz’s THE RESCUE OF COSETTE, depicting a pivotal scene from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, may indeed, as the artist notes, owe something to brooding works by Zorn in which “figures emerge out of a dark, mysterious background.” And yet, the painting also expresses—through its flashes of lamplight and the luminous face of the child—an all-American sweetness and warmth far removed from brooding Scandinavian climes.

After all, as Dunaway concludes and her fellow present-day artists concur, “Every artist living today stands on the shoulders of those who have come before. There’s an infinite amount to be learned from these great masters. We put some of that into our own paintings and add our own voices. Each generation expands the language of painting.”

This story was featured in the July 2016 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art July 2016 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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