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The Alpine Sketchbooks of John Singer Sargent: A Young Artist's Perspective (Repost)

Posted By: step778
The Alpine Sketchbooks of John Singer Sargent: A Young Artist's Perspective (Repost)

Stephen D. Rubin, "The Alpine Sketchbooks of John Singer Sargent: A Young Artist's Perspective"
1991 | pages: 49 | ISBN: 0870996347 | PDF | 5,4 mb

It's an exhibit catalog based on two 1870 sketchbooks restored at the Metropolitan. Sargent filled these as a 14-year-old on a three-week summer tramp through the Alps with his father. The works depicted appear to be in a variety of media: watercolor, graphite pencil and charcoal? Unfortunately for fully appreciating the watercolors, the reproductions are in black and white. There are several pages of informative text as well. As an aside, the author, researching the project, is said to have retraced the Sargents' intinerary through the mountains, proving that art scholarship is not always petty bickering over arcane marginalia of less and less relevance. Great work if you can get it!

Although these are not Sargent's earliest extant sketch books, they are efforts from a fourteen-year-old prior to any real formal and professional training in art. This claim is tenable, despite the stories of tutorial by Sargent's ever-at-her-easel mother, due the author's assessment of her own actual work. "The crude drawing style, incorrect perspective, and inept use of watercolor technique…" Well, perhaps she instilled a love of art, if not the concrete means to it. So these few works of little John Sargent offer interesting data on the timeline of his artistic development. And the book is worth it for this reason alone.

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