John Singer Sargent 1856-1925

Major George Conrad Roller, 1911 (gift from the artist)
Mrs. George Roller (his wife)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 23, 1948, lot 148
Schweitzer Gallery, New York
Babcock Galleries, New York
Macbeth Galleries, New York, 1953
J.J. Ryan, Washington, D.C., 1953
Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, 1986
Private Collection, San Antonio, Texas
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1997

London, England, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by the late John S. Sargent R.A., Winter 1926. no. 282
New York, Adelson Galleries, Inaugural Exhibition: One Hundred Years of American & European Art, November-December 1990, no. 4, illustrated

Evan Charteris, John Sargent, London and New York, 1927, p. 291 (as Woman in a Cashmere Shawl)
Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography, New York, 1955, p. 450
David McKibbin, Sargent's Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, 1956, p. 83
Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, New York, 1970, pp. 70-76
Warren Adelson et al., Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes, New York, 1997, p. 92, illustrated in color

Cashmere Shawl, painted in 1910, belongs to a series of highly celebrated works produced during John Singer Sargent’s summer sojourns in the Italian Alps.  Sargent’s subject, Dorothy Barnard, a close family friend and frequent traveling partner, is pictured swathed in a Turkish cashmere shawl reclining next to Nicola D’Inverno, the artist’s valet.  The paisley bordered shawl, which is featured in several paintings and watercolors of the period, evinces Sargent’s keen aesthetic interest in orientalism, a vogue popularized by a great number of European artists during the 19^th century. 

 

Sargent spent his holidays painting and traveling on the continent, often dividing his time between the Swiss Alps during the hot summer months and Italian cities such as Venice, Florence and Rome in the fall and by 1900, these summer interludes became increasingly important as a source of creative inspiration.   Preferring to paint the picturesque European scenery and his intimate group of friends and relatives to society portraiture with its often stifling parameters, he stopped accepting portrait commissions altogether by 1909.  In this period’s late subject pictures, which are considered among his most beautiful and mature works, Sargent took as his models selected traveling companions and close family members, causing Mary Newbold Patterson Hale, Sargent’s second cousin, to refer to these paintings and watercolors as his “painted diaries.” This notion of a “painted diary” brilliantly conveys the highly personal nature of Sargent’s relationship to his subjects and captures the underlying emotion that sets these late subject pictures apart from much of his other work.  Ilene Susan Fort writes, “The holiday spirit emotionally liberated the artist from the rigors of his academic training and patrons’ expectations.  He may have also felt freed from the limitations of acceptable subject matter.  The contradictions in the imagery suggest that the artist was performing a kind of subterfuge” (Sargent and Italy, New York, 1999, p.141).  At the core of these paintings and studies is a startling intimacy that is casually seductive in both its off-handedness and directness. 

 

Sargent’s entourage, which often included Dorothy Barnard, and her sister Polly, modeled for him during these summer expeditions and the artist arranged his sitters in languorous poses, enjoying idle moments of relaxation amidst the mountain landscape.  During the 1907 trip to Purtud, Italy, Sargent brought along colorful veils, shawls and trousers to use specifically as costumes in his works.  Jane de Glehn, a frequent companion, described the cheerful atmosphere at Purtud in a 1907 letter to her mother: “Yesterday I spent all day posing in the morning in Turkish costume for Sargent on the mossy banks of the Brook.  I and Rose-Marie, one of the little Ormondes [sic].  He is doing a harem disporting itself on the banks of the stream.  He has stacks of lovely Oriental clothes and [he dresses anyone he can set in them.  It is marvelous to watch him paint…” (quoted in Patricia Hills, “‘Painted Diaries’: Sargent’s Late Subject Pictures,” John Singer Sargent, New York, 1986, p. 186). Cashmere Shawl vividly illustrates Mrs. de Glehn’s descriptive account.   Sargent has arranged Dorothy and Nicola in a casual manner, integrating the colorful vintage costumes with the lush setting.  In the subject pictures of this period, Sargent displays once again his affinity for the exotic subject matter that had preoccupied him in the genre pictures he painted in Italy, Spain and North Africa earlier in his career.  As Richard Ormond has observed, “Sargent had been attracted to the bizarre and exotic since his youth, and these late extravagant late Alpine studies represent its climax” (John Singer Sargent, 1970, p. 75).

 

The cashmere shawl featured in the present composition was incorporated into many of Sargent’s best known works from 1907-1911, including Cashmere of 1908 (Private Collection, fig. 1) and watercolor The Cashmere Shawl (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, fig. 2).  The large, sheet size shawl, which was probably made in Kashmir around 1800-1820, presented Sargent with countless opportunities to explore the decorative potential of its patterns, colors and fabric as it drapes and adorns his sitters. Sargent’s heavy application and active handling of paint create richly textured surfaces which mirrored the intricacy of the shawl.

 

Just as the cashmere shawl afforded Sargent an array of aesthetic possibilities and artistic liberties, it also signaled freedom in his choice of subject matter.  Richard Ormond writes, Sargent “drew on orientalist imagery that carried with it a dense weight of romantic association.  Since the first translation of the Arabian nights in the late eighteenth century, and the publication of William Beckford’s Vathek and Lord Byron’s Don Juan in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writes and artists had drawn on subject matter and imagery that were exotic, outside normal experience, and deeply liberating.  In the East they envisioned, familiar rules and conventions did not apply—bizarre and magical happenings took place; danger and wonder were commingled; anything was possible.  Few themes were more compelling that that of the harem, with its atmosphere of seclusion, voluptuousness, romantic intrigue, sexuality, cruelty, and male domination” (Sargent Abroad, p. 86).   In Cashmere Shawl, Dorothy Barnard’s is figure entirely swathed in the large shawl lending her character an aura of exoticism and mystery which signal Sargent’s departure from the traditional Victorian mores of the times.

 

Fort writes, “The Alpine paintings sit outside Sargent’s usual work, evincing neither the painterly academism of his portraits nor the full Impressionism of his landscape and figure paintings created in Broadway, England…The Alpine works as a whole do evince a new, more progressive boldness, particularly in design, that demonstrates a daring level of experimentation….[These Alpine Pictures] display contradictions in time, gender orientation, and degree of sexuality that can be understood only within the social context of the age.  Sargent was a personality not only aesthetically progressive but also socially bohemian; his opinions and taste were sometimes at odds with, and too modern for, the strictest Victorian society” (Sargent and  Italy, Princeton, New Jersey, 2003, pp. 141-42).  Cashmere Shawl is at once the artistic embodiment of Sargent’s mature style and a daring and bold portrayal of the artist’s inner circle.