John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

John Singer Sargent’s approach to watercolor was unconventional. Going beyond turn-of-the-century standards for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes his confidently bold dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer of an exhibition in London proclaimed him “an eagle in a dove-cote”; another called his work “swagger” watercolors. For Sargent however the watercolors were not so much about swagger as about a renewed and liberated approach to painting. In watercolor his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected as he considered the way one image--often of a friend or favorite place--enhanced another. Sargent held only two major watercolor exhibitions in the United States during his lifetime. The contents of the first in 1909 were purchased in their entirety by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The paintings exhibited in the other in 1912 were scooped up by the Museum of Fine Arts B