Category Archives: #FineArtFriday

Artist: John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)

Title: Boats at Anchor

Medium: Watercolor

Date: ca. 1917

Location: Worcester Art Museum

What I love about this painting:

John Singer Sargent is best known for his work done in oils, and they are brilliant. But I really love his seascapes done in the medium of watercolor. Canals, rivers, oceans, or lakes – Sargent painted the sheen of calm water beneath a summer’s sun or the gray froth and white water of storm-driven waves.

John Singer Sargent made his living painting society portraits in oils, but he had a true gift for the less-prestigious medium of watercolor which seemed to be his choice whenever he was just painting a scene for fun. He could capture the personality of a day as skillfully as he did when painting the portraits of Madame X and Theodore Rosevelt.

In recent years, Sargent’s numerous paintings of boats have gained some recognition by critics. In this picture, he shows us the South Atlantic, a small yacht or fishing boat. (I can’t decide which, but I’m leaning toward fishing vessel.) She is berthed in a marina with two smaller boats tied to her.

The small boats are the kind of rowboats that my father was partial to for trout or bass fishing. A light breeze ruffles the water, and the South Atlantic sits serenely at her berth. The boat is wide, but the prow is sleek, and I’ll bet that, under sail, she cuts though the water.

The way he shows the sky and boats reflected in the water is exactly how it looks on a calm day in a marina. He loved boats, but in this painting, water and reflections take center stage.

About The Artist via Wikipedia:

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the “leading portrait painter of his generation” for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

Born in Florence to American parents, he was trained in Paris before moving to London, living most of his life in Europe. He enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter. An early submission to the Paris Salon in the 1880s, his Portrait of Madame X, was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter in Paris but instead resulted in scandal. During the next year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England where he continued a successful career as a portrait artist.

From the beginning, Sargent’s work is characterized by remarkable technical facility, particularly in his ability to draw with a brush, which in later years inspired admiration as well as criticism for a supposed superficiality. His commissioned works were consistent with the grand manner of portraiture, while his informal studies and landscape paintings displayed a familiarity with Impressionism. In later life Sargent expressed ambivalence about the restrictions of formal portrait work and devoted much of his energy to mural painting and working en plein air. Art historians generally ignored society artists such as Sargent until the late 20th century.

With his watercolors, Sargent was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. In watercolors, he playfully portrayed his friends and family dressed in Orientalist costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions (The Chess Game, 1906). His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Evan Charteris wrote in 1927:

‘To live with Sargent’s watercolors is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, ‘the refluent shade’ and ‘the Ambient ardors of the noon.’

Although not generally accorded the critical respect given Winslow Homer, perhaps America’s greatest watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique, including the methods used by Homer. [1]

Credits and Attributions:

IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Sargent – Boats at Anchor, 1917, 1917.90.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Sargent_-_Boats_at_Anchor,_1917,_1917.90.jpg&oldid=1154766116 (accessed July 3, 2026).

[1] Wikipedia contributors, “John Singer Sargent,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Singer_Sargent&oldid=1360295475 (accessed July 3, 2026).