Yesterday I made my way to London to see the ‘Sargent and Fashion’ exhibition at Tate Britain which really is a fabulous show and well worth a visit.
I love Sargent’s work and have always had an interest in late 19th fashion, and love to see portrait with the actual dresses worn by the sitters displayed alongside. It’s utterly beguiling to look at the details and see them captured in brushstrokes over a hundred years ago; looking at the dress then at the canvas, just as that artist would have done.
I loved these photographs of Sargent painting a portrait. I love the blurred hands and face, signalling a sense of movement – of ‘nowness’ in the distant past.
But even though this was a fabulous show, the thing that captivated me most was in the Turner collection. Now, Turner was obviously a genius and although I love his more painterly works, I’m not such a fan of his earlier landscapes. What I love above all else are his watercolours and smaller works in chalk and gouache. And the works I loved the most were his 1840 scenes of Venice moonlight, two of which I’ve reproduced below.
It’s hard to put my finger on why these had such an impact. I think though, it’s the immediacy of the images. Standing in front of something painted almost 200 years ago, where the brushstrokes are so quick and fluid, one gets a sense of the moment it was made. In the image above, this is made the more so by the small patch of night sky seen through the arch.
The same is true of this image where the sky is so sketch and the figures are reduced almost to daubs.