Nature as Personal Experience

When John Singer Sargent Painted the French artist Paul Helleu sketching outdoors with his wife in 1889, he revealed a great deal about both the practice and the purpose of the new movement in landscape painting as it would emerge in the US. Landscape painting (not just the more common landscape drawing) has been brought outdoors, a point made forcefully by the artist's canvas shown resting directly on the ground, in the midst of the subject he is depicting, and by the presence of his brushes and portable palette. Sargent, already a well-known portraitist, depicts his model, an academically trained figure painter who usually worked in the studio, embracing the plein air method and the commitment to direct observation that recently had become mainstays of his own work.

Sargent had been painting outdoors from time to time in the Worcestershire countryside since 1885, when he left Paris and settled in London. His first summers in the West Country were spent in Broadway, about twelve miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon, where he joined an informal colony of artists and writers. In March 1889 he took a house at Fladbury Rectory, near Broadway, on the river Avon. There he was visited by Helleu, a close friend from his Paris days and, like himself, an admirer of Claude Monet's...

Sargent's Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife shows ordinary people as they might actually have been found on a sunny afternoon at the water's edge, instead of the mythological, historical, or picturesque models represented by academic artists. Sargent has chosen an elevated vantagepoint, viewing the couple from above, the reeds and grass behind them forming a screen that blocks the distant view. The composition creates a balance between the figures and their setting and establishes an enclosed and somewhat private space set off from the surrounding landscape.

The focus on Helleu's hand and its decisive gesture asserts the importance of the act of painting. During the 1870s and 1880s younger American painters, Sargent among them, had learned the significance of technical virtuosity while studying abroad, and many of them, unlike Sargent, returned home to preach what the critic Mariana Griswold Van Resselaer called a new "artistic gospel": "The painter's first privilege, first task, first duty [is] to learn the art of painting."

PP 51-52 American Impressionism and Realism, H Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger, David Park Curry with the assistance of N. Mishoe Brennecke