What Makes This Painting Great?

What Makes This Painting Great? An occasional series all about analyzing what makes paintings beautiful, iconic, memorable, or effective.

Painters, beginners and masters alike, make leaps and bounds by studying creative triumphs of the art. What kind of principles, techniques, compositional designs or color choices have artists used to create your favorite paintings? 

While John Singer Sargent is best known for his theatrical portraits of society women, the artist freed himself up from the constraints of formal portrait commissions in smaller and more spontaneous works in oil and watercolor painted in the open air. It’s here that we most get to revel in his incredible eye for outdoor light, color (and color temperature) nuance, and powerful, original compositions. 

In the summer of 1878, Sargent painted a series of marvelous plein air oils on the island of Capri in the Mediterranean. Capri was then one of those magical, unspoiled places that combine turquoise water, a dramatic coastline, fragrant groves and ocean air with a relaxed culture and a colorful history rooted in antiquity and still visible in the remnant architecture of ancient Phoenician, Greek, and Roman times.

No wonder Capri had been a favorite destination for painters since the early 1800s. 

John Singer Sargent, Staircase in Capri, 1878

Twenty years after Sargent’s visit, the American painter Francis Millet captured something of the appeal of Capri’s rural agricultural society for artists with his remark that “the primitive life of the peasant remains much the same in all essential features . . . undisturbed by the gleam of the white umbrella or the red flash of the Baedeker.” [1] At the time of Sargent’s stay on the island, several artist friends of his were also visiting, sealing the deal on his decision to make the island his summer painting destination that year. 

During his stay, Sargent was befriended by an English painter, Frank Hyde, who had a studio in an abandoned monastery (Santa Teresa) on a terraced hill overlooking sun-bleached villas and ancient groves of olive trees (I mean, can you imagine?!). Sargent used both Hyde’s studio and his exceptional model, Rosina Ferrara, in many of the Capri paintings.

John Singer Sargent, Rosina Ferrara, Head of a Capri Girl, oil on cardboard, 49×41 cm, (1878) Denver Art Museum.

Rosina was described by Sargent’s early biographer, Evan Charteris, as “an Ana-Capri girl, a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut brown, with a mass of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type.” [2] 

John Singer Sargent, View of Capri (1878), Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 63.5 cm (20 × 25 in).

Capri Girl on a Rooftop (1878), Oil on canvas, 50.8 × 63.5 cm (20 × 25 in). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Bentonville, Arkansas

The painting titled “A Capriote” (tope of page) is one of several near-identical compositions and other images Sargent made of Ferrara in profile. In the version at the top of the page, Sargent adapted the conventional image of picturesque types so popular at the Paris Salon in a more lyrical composition, reminiscent in both subject and color palette of the late, dreamlike forest compositions of mid-nineteenth century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. A second version partakes a bit more of the then contemporary Impressionists’ love of glowing color.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Capri Girl (Dans les Oliviers, à Capri) (1878), oil on canvas, 77.5 x 63.5 cm, Private collection. The Athenaeum.

Sargent exhibited this version at the 1879 Paris Salon, while he sent back the near-identical A Capriote at the top of this page, temporarily titled Dans les Oliviers à Capri, for the annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York the same year. 

Ferrara’s striking, somewhat contrived pose utterly freshens the “picturesque woman/nymph in the woods” European convention with both conceptual and stylistic innovation. Painted from life, the model’s twisted stance echoes the forms of the branches, suggesting a kinship between them of wild and natural beauty. Sargent thereby equates his model with a classically inspired dryad, making her an elemental part of the wild Capri landscape – at the same time that she’s still “just a girl” (in the words of No Doubt<< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHzOOQfhPFg). The approach alone, not to mention the very loose brushwork, was innovative and “modern” for the day.

Critical reaction to the composition was mixed: the more subdued painting received acclaim in New York, while the more colorful version in Paris was praised by several writers, but also inspired criticism from more conservative reviewers. It was caricatured as resembling the struggles of the mythological Laocoön against constricting serpents. 

Hellenic sculpture – the mythical Laocoon and his sons struggling against serpents.

The MFA canvas bears traces of Sargent’s under-drawing and evidence of several changes in the model’s pose and in the arrangement of her skirt. Such revisions remind us that Sargent’s process was very conscious and meticulously worked out before the composition reached its final form. 

On its debut in March 1879 at the second annual exhibition of the recently founded Society of American Artists in New York, A Capriote was described as a “Mediterranean idyll . . . [with] delightful coolness, exquisite delicacy and bright effect of light,” and earned Sargent praise as “an artist of such freshness and 

originality that we feel justified in basing great hopes upon his future work.” [3] 

Sargent sold A Capriote to lumber baron Ichabod Thomas Williams (1826–1899), an American collector with an important French art collection.[4] It’s currently on view in the collection of the Boston Museum of fine Arts, which provided much of the text for this article.

Notes 
1. Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, October 1898, 858. 
2. Evan Edward Charteris, John Sargent (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 48. 
3. Daily Graphic (New York), 8 March 1879, 58. 
4. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874–1882 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 161. 

If you could use some painting advice from John Singer Sargent, you can access a wealth of his wisdom in a video by Thomas Jefferson Kitts titled John Singer Sargent – Techniques of a Master.

Contemporary Capri Lands in Oregon Gallery

Tom Fawkes, Pompeii Pines, acrylic on panel, 2023, 24.25 x 48.25 inches framed

Realist painter Tom Fawkes, a long-time, well-established artist living in Portland, OR, is showing new work painted in Italy (including Capri) at Russo Lee Gallery. 

An MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art, Tom Fawkes taught at the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1960s. From 1972 – 2004, Fawkes taught drawing and painting at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He has been the recipient of several awards including an OAC fellowship, an NEA fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. His works are in numerous collections including Safeco, Microsoft, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. 

Tom Fawkes, On the way to Villa Jovis, Capri, acrylic on linen, 38.25 x 58.25 inches framed (2023)

For this exhibition, Fawkes continues his pursuit of painting classical Italian Renaissance gardens and landscapes. The exhibition also features three-dimensional painted constructions of doors and passageways with views of historical architecture and sculptural objects. Fawkes pulls the viewer into the scenes he paints, capturing the smallest details of the garden spaces and the luscious textural qualities of Roman interiors.