John Singer Sargent (1856－1925) was an American artist and a senior fellow of the American National Watercolor Society. He created more than 2000 watercolor paintings and 900 oil paintings all his life as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings.
His paintings depict what he had seen and heard when he traveled around the world. His subjects include British countryside, Venice of Italy, Delos of Austro-Hungarian, Corfu of Greece, the Middle East, Montana of the US, Maine, Florida, and so on.
His watercolor paintings are extremely vivid and everything he depicts is as enchanting as a dream. He thinks that brushwork is the trace left on the medium when painters are objectively describing objects and expressing subjective emotion. It is like human fingerprints, which are different from one another.
Sargent set a precedent of drawing techniques in the contemporary watercolor painting. He created images with bravura brushstroke and gorgeous colors, initiated the method of “toning pictures”. All these made his paintings full of vigor and fluid splendor like a boiling palette. In order to achieve the richness of effects, he would use oil pastels as supporting materials or pour some liquid oil paints before the painting. In this way, oil and water would exclude each other and form water stains, thus creating the effect of graining. This painting method expressed modern art imagery which becomes an important style of American watercolor art.
In his early years, Sargent expressed his interest in nature, architecture, foreign people and high mountains by creating watercolor paintings. In his old age, he painted for his own sake. He painted with joyful brushwork a lot of paintings which took his family, friends, garden and fountain as his subjects. He also took it as a kind of amusement to paint his friends and family in oriental clothes and put the main characters in a bright background.
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