Rooftop Rosina: Capri and Naples

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Sargent’s Orientalist works, in perusal of those presented in his catalogue raisonné, seem to be split into two major camps; architectural studies and scenes of women and/or children in action, i.e. dancing or taking part in local customs. For his part, Sargent oddly shies away from depicting scenes of masculine culture in these foreign locales, relegating the Orient, like many painters before him, to an arena dominated by women and their quiet participation in native life. This was a notably ‘sensitive’ subject for a male artist when taking into account that none of

Saïd, Orientalism, 119.

these images of women are overtly sexualised or fetishistic – there are no harems present here – an aspect of his imagery that is also remarked upon in regards to his images of children in Chapter Four. Outside of general themes, many of these images all contain elements that can be categorised as falling within typical French/British paradigms – realistic in their capturing of scenes of Oriental authenticity, and artiPicial, in that they manipulate perspective, colour, and light in order to capture something ‘beautiful’ as opposed to something ‘factual.’

An excellent starting point is to look at Sargent’s earliest exotic works produced from his 1878 travels to Capri and Naples, which focus on his model and muse Rosina Ferrara. A Capriote (Fig. 58) and the rooftop series encompassing Capri and View of Capri (Figs. 59&60), as well as Stringing Onions (Fig. 61) and Rosina (Fig. 62) all use her as a model, presented in an odd array of styles and situations. If British Orientalism is, as Barringer states, ‘a hard won realism,’ then the Capri Peasant – Study (Fig. 63),²³ a closely cropped side proPile view of Rosina’s face, could be considered an ethnographic ‘documentation’ of ‘an Arab type,’ a term which Sargent used to describe her in his letters home.²⁴ This was widely

considered Sargent’s intent when the image was shown at the Society of American Artists in 1881.

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The head of a Capri peasant-‐girl, by John S. Sargent, is Pirmly and neatly painted, and is in itself an interesting proPile. One regards it with the curiosity of an ethnologist rather than the pleasure that one expects to get from a work of art. Is this a type from that distinct race settled in Anacapri which is said to have been introduced from Greece? It has the look of the Phenician, and may be proPitably compared with the busts at the

Metropolitan Museum which were found in Cyprus. [sic]²⁵

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Sargent chose to exhibit this work as a stand-‐alone image, but the similarity

between Rosina’s proPile and the shape of her hairstyle here to that of his 1879 Salon submission Dans Les Oliviers Capri suggest that the later SAA work was either a facial study executed while he prepared for the 1879 work, or a later close study executed to Plesh out his submission portfolio.

Charteris, John Sargent, 48.

“Some American Artists. Various Notable Pictures in the Exhibition”, New York

Times, April 15, 1881, 5.

ScientiPic exactitude here is considered to be something far from ‘a work of art,’

which seems contradictory to the wider appeal of the highly detailed British Orientalist art of the period, as seen, for example, in the works of John Frederick Lewis. His 1871 Lilium Auratum (Fig. 64), an image of a harem woman and her servant in what appears to be a palace garden, could have easily passed for early PRB Millais. In veritable Ophelia-‐like fashion, each Plower can be identiPied by its species, while the details on the women’s clothing can be followed by their individual decorative stitches. There seems to be a disconnect between what British critics and later art historians are dePining as ethnography/realism and something more akin to a kind of higher level of capturing elements, which

functions along a more ‘art for art’s sake’ rhetoric in its overwhelming conveyance of sumptuous beauty through intense detail.

Tim Barringer claims that Lewis not Aesthetic due to this vested interest in detailed realism; he instead makes a distinct separation between Lewis being an

‘Orientalist’ while someone like Leighton, whom he calls ‘the Aesthete’ was different because ‘he felt no need to evoke with crystal clarity the details of the world evoked in his painting, not to ensure even a superPicial coherence of

historical period or geographical setting.’²⁶ I do not agree with this view that detail automatically negates a/Aesthetic purpose, and viewing Aestheticism as a

cosmopolitan movement aids in better embracing the complexity of what

conveying beauty actually represented during this period. Perhaps Sargent’s aim, like Lewis’s, in taking down this amount of detail was not to convey scientiPic exactitude, or to objectify foreign women into ‘objects for study’ but rather to present beauty through close focus. Michel-‐Eugène Chevreul, the French colour theorist whom I intend to discuss in further depth in Chapter Five, stated in his Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their Application to the Arts:

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It is certain that, in warmer climes, there are brown, bronzed, copper complexions even, endued with brilliancy, I may say beauty, appreciated only by those who in pronouncing upon a new object, wait until they have got rid of habitual impressions, which (although the majority of men do not Barringer, “Orientalism and Aestheticism”, 248.

know it) exercise so powerful an inPluence upon the judgment of objects seen for the Pirst time.²⁷

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Sargent himself certainly appears to be one who frequently ‘got rid of [his] habitual impressions’ when going abroad, as seen in his letter at the beginning of this

chapter. His intention then, in executing these studies, was perhaps not to capture the scientiPic ‘type’ for the European market, but rather to challenge that market’s forms of accepted beauty by blurring the lines between what was considered documentary and aesthetic. A highly detailed image did not have to be a scientiPic study, but rather could convey the beauty of form through the capturing of even its smallest details.

However, this discussion of realism and ethnography falls by the wayside temporarily when confronted with the remainder of Sargent’s Capri works, which rely heavily on what Barringer would categorise as belonging to Leighton’s form of Aestheticism; soft facture, lush, dreamlike atmospheres, rich colours and gentle forms, although in Sargent’s case it may have been more closely inspired by Delacroix, as in his quote from Minchin. See, for example, Sargent’s 1878 Salon submission A Capriote and its reworked copy Dans Les Oliviers, Capri. Whereas Rosina’s proPile appears clear in the centre, the rest of the composition relies heavily on loose brushwork and tonal earthly colours. Sargent manipulates the landscape in order to emphasise the Plowing lines of Rosina’s arms as they drape languorously over the trunk of a tree, negating what one reviewer called ‘any Pre-‐

Raphaelite exactness.’²⁸ The rest of the landscape: the trees, grasses and crumbling stonewall are all painted in a hazy blur, with Rosina as a clear and focused centre.

The beauty of the ‘Arab type,’ placed in a dream-‐like landscape, does little to provide the viewer with the authenticity of a foreign locale. This is more

signiPicantly true when comparing A Capriote to Dans Les Oliviers, Capri, as in the previous image Sargent included varying tones of greens to allude to the

Michel Eugène Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours and their

Application to the Arts, trans. Charles Martel (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longman’s, 1855), 120.

“American Art Methods: The Society of Artists”, 3.

composition of the grasses, whereas in the Salon work the Pield has been reduced to a single shade of yellow, bringing up the contrast against the tall dandelion stalks.²⁹ This change creates a clearer separation between the ground and trees behind Rosina, carving out a horizon line in the stonewall, but also sets to focus the eye more squarely on Rosina’s detailed face in the middle.

Sargent’s other images of Rosina all continue well with this trend of using loosely brushed, fantasy-‐like worlds with soft colours and blurred lines. His series of oils depicting Rosina and a friend dancing on a rooftop, Capri Girl on a Rooftop (Fig. 65) and the aforementioned View of Capri, and Capri, seem more concerned with aesthetics – architectural lines versus bodily curves lines, dark skin versus white walls – than an attempt at any kind of detailed depiction of native dance or dress (even though Rosina does wear traditional clothes and is dancing the tarantella, a native folk dance). Instead of executing something like the works of Lewis, who would have Pilled the scene with minute details, Sargent instead gives us the essence of exotic life -‐ its impression. It is a world full of sensuous pleasures:

colour, light, women, fabric and music, but on a completely different scale to Lewis.

His later ¾ image Rosina dissolves further into this mass of dark hair and skin against white walls and light clothing, performing a remarkable contrast to the highly detailed Head of a Capri Girl.

Sargent’s images straddle this line of contemporary Orientalism and how it is dePined by nationalistic standards. On one hand he is depicting ‘truth’ and

‘nature’ to the extent that The New York Times compares one Rosina to a museum object, and then in the next instance another Rosina is described as being ‘without any Pre-‐Raphaelite exactness.’ If we are to work on the categorisations of British Orientalism’s focus on detail, and French Orientalism’s emphasis on fantasy and atmosphere, then Sargent in this method is both a French and British Orientalist;

thus by ascribing to him the name of cosmopolitan, he becomes a combination of

These are basically the same image, with slight detailed differences that I list

above. Sargent made a second one presumably to send overseas to the Society of American Artists exhibition in May of 1879. The Pirst version, A Capriote, was exhibited in the Paris Salon at the same time, so thus could not be sent.

both, united through their desire to capture beauty in all its forms – through detail, quickness of hand, or some amalgamation of both.

Yet what is also at play here is a potential reaction against the typical views of what Oriental art should be. One on hand, Fromentin and Pater dePine it as one that is ‘exaggerated, violent and seemingly excessive’, and both Lewis and Sargent’s capturing of it in such high detail contributes to this view of such locations as areas of ‘excess’.³⁰ But in his later works Sargent also puriPies scenes down to simple contrasts and colours in an embrace of the opposite, conveying Oriental locations and beauty as places of pure and simple pleasures, to be appreciated for its own sake. His capturing of both ‘types’ of views of the Orient also blurs the boundaries of these separate categorizations, indicating that Sargent is an artist seeking visual beauty, regardless of whether or not that beauty or a speciPic view of it Pit into prescribed national standards on how one ‘should’ capture such people and spaces.

If Sargent didn’t align his person or his art to one speciPic exhibition venue or country, as exhibited in Appendix A, why then would he choose to depict a scene through similar Pilters? In this view, Sargent’s Orient becomes, like Sargent himself, all things at once, in a way a more accurate embrace of the ‘truth’ of a culture than any espoused by ethnography, science or realism.

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‘Strange Fiorituras and Guttural Roulades’: Spain and El Jaleo

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After Capri and Naples, Sargent then travelled to Spain, no doubt at the insistence of Carolus-‐Duran, to study Velazquez directly from life at the Prado. Even though Spain was well within the European continent, artists traveling there

considered it akin to visiting the East, with Spanish culture exerting a type of exoticism, brutality and sensuality signiPicantly ‘other’ from the cultures of Britain and France. Kenneth McConkey accurately termed it a ‘country at the margin of

Fromentin, Between Sea and Sahara, 144.

Europe in which an old, exotic culture turned temptingly away from the stranger.’³¹ This may have found root in Napoleon’s eastern campaigns earlier in the century, as Napoleon considered Africa to being ‘south of the Pyrenees,’ while Victor Hugo, in his introduction to Les Orientales (1829), lists the Orient as encompassing ‘Greeks, Persians, Arabs, as well as Spanish, because Spain is also in the East; Spain is half African, Africa is half Asiatic.’³² Sargent had travelled to Spain before as a child in 1868, visiting Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Córdoba, Seville, Cadiz and Gibraltar with his family so this exploration some ten years later marked a sort of ‘returning’

for him, albeit with fresh Parisian-‐tinted eyes.

Though his youthful trip most likely left an early imprint on Sargent, it was the decidedly Hispano-‐obsessive atmosphere in Paris which most likely pushed Sargent to reconsider Spain as an ‘oriental’ topic for visual consideration. The French fascination with Spain, which McConkey calls hispagnolisme,³³ had been a continuous theme throughout the century, beginning with Napoleon’s occupation of Spain during the Peninsular War (1808-‐1813), reaching from 1838 to 1848, when the Galerie Espagnole was opened in the Louvre.³⁴ Though brief, the Galerie Espagnole inspired a wide array of painters later in the century, notably Manet, who’s early Spanish work The Spanish Singer (Le Guitarrero) (Fig. 66) appeared in the Salon in 1860. Manet’s Spanish pictures in turn roused the next generation of impressionable young artists including a young Carolus-‐Duran and in turn Sargent.

Manet’s method in his Spanish paintings, directly or through this trickle down effect, may have had the additional benePit of encouraging Sargent to incorporate

Kenneth McConkey, “The Theology of Painting – the cult of Velazquez and British

Art at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (December/Winter 2005): 190. See also his “A Thousand Miles towards the Sun:

British Artist-‐Travellers to Spain and Morocco at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”, Visual Culture in Britain 4, no. 1 (2003): 25-‐43 and Enriqueta Harris,

"Velázquez and Murillo in Nineteenth-‐Century Britain: An Approach Through Prints”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 50 (1987): 148-‐159.

Edward J. Sullivan, “Mariano Fortuny y Marsal and Orientalism in Nineteenth

Century Spain”, Arts Magazine 55, no. 8 (April 1981): 97; Victor Hugo, Les Orientales, (Brussels: E. Laurent, 1832), 14.

McConkey, “The Theology of Painting”, 189.

Tinterow and Lacambre, Manet/Velazquez, 49.

historical and modern styles, or as Juliet Wilson-‐Bareau calls Manet’s ‘double game’, where he is ‘both pastiching the past and engaging it. And in relation to speciPically ‘Spanish’ subject matter, he was both Hispanicizing French subjects and addressing real-‐life Spanish persons and themes.’³⁵ Such an approach certainly contains elements of the cosmopolitan, and Sargent continued to cultivate this kind of method when executing his own Spanish works for the Salon.

In returning to Sargent’s own Spanish works of this period, there is a continued approach, as in Capri, of capturing scenes that veer strangely between factual replication and sensuous invention. Again the work is split clearly into two distinct groups: in depth architectural and object studies or images of women engaging in cultural practices, mostly dancing, culminating in his 1882 major Salon submission El Jaleo (Danse de Gitanes) The architectural and object studies; see, for example, Santa Maria le Blanca, Toledo (Fig. 67) and multiple works titled under Alhambra, Patio de los Leones; An Archway (Figs. 68-‐70) are mysteriously void of any human Pigures at all, implying that these were perhaps notations of appealing shapes, colours or patterns documented for later use. Since most of images were never exhibited during his lifetime, and were sold in the Christie’s auction after his death in 1925, such works seem to belong to a type of personal ethnographic collection, accumulated in what Richard Ormond mentions as a scrapbook of photos, postcards and drawings of Spanish architecture and locations – now in the Metropolitan Museum collection – that provided a type of reference book for Sargent throughout his later career.

In light of this idea of the ‘private Orient,’ i.e. one which the artist kept to himself and never exhibited, another facet of Orientalism comes to light – a form of Aesthetic decorative ethnography, if you will. Sargent’s detailed copying of these exotic elements, in works like An Alhambra Vase, Sketch of a Spanish Crucidix and Sketch of a Spanish Madonna (Figs. 71-‐73), are all seemingly executed not in any speciPically scientiPic or didactic function but rather as a collection of eccentric embellishments. This practice, in a way, certainly mimics Fromentin’s statement on

Juliet Wilson-‐Bareau, “Manet and Spain”, in Tinterow and Lacambre, Manet/

Velazquez, 224.

the Orient’s ‘appeal to the eyes’; Sargent is collecting the elements he Pinds most visually ‘exaggerated, violent, and seemingly obsessive,’ in order to support his production of an art that is evocative of non-‐normative forms of beauty.

However, this practice manages to distil the exotic down to an amalgamation of attractive elements as opposed to embodying a real live and thriving culture. In one respect it is a form of extreme Aestheticism, not only in that it represents an attraction solely to the aspects of foreign culture seen to be most visually or sensually pleasing, but also that it subtracts those elements from their contextual and cultural narratives or usage, as objects presented ‘for their own sake’. Sargent also seems to be participating in this kind of focused Aestheticism in some of his images of Spanish dancing Pigures, where the subjects are presented in dark,

abstract surroundings that could represent any number of locations. This works on a similar method to the closely cropped facial images discussed earlier. Such an extraction of person from atmosphere participates in what I would call a ‘Plattening of culture’ as it shifts a native participant of that culture from its involvement in a complex environment to its value only as a single piece, or a moveable,

interchangeable part whose values lies in its beauty and not its function. Such a practice echoes Nochlin’s words that the Orient was often placed ‘in a category of obfuscation, masking important distinctions under the rubric of the picturesque, supported by the illusion of the real.’³⁶ This approach highlights Sargent’s

dedicated emphasis not to an imperialistic or critical visual regime, but one that focused more distinctly on the capturing or conveyance of the ‘picturesque’, however he found it, for the musings of both his private self as well as his public audience.

The rest of these Spanish works all continue along this method, honing in intently on the theme of Spanish dance and music, something akin to a fascination and maybe even obsession for Sargent. He writes to Vernon Lee on 9 July 1880:

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You wished some Spanish songs. I could not Pind any good ones. The best are what one hears in Andalucía, the half African Malagueñas & Soleàs,, dismal,

Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient”, 56.

restless chants that it is impossible to note. They are something between a Hungarian Czaradas and the chant of the Italian peasant in the Pields, and are generally composed of Pive strophes and end stormily on the dominant, the theme quite lost in strange Piorituras and guttural roulades. The Gitano

In document 'Curiouser and Curiouser': John Singer Sargent's Cosmopolitan Aesthetics (Page 153-173)