Sargent · Method 4 of 10
Charcoal Portrait
1907–1925 (the post-"mugs" late career)
The method
In 1907 Sargent stopped painting the society portrait and started drawing it in charcoal instead. He had been the most expensive oil portraitist in London for twenty years; he came back to charcoal because it was fast. A commission that had taken twelve sittings in oil now took three hours on paper, and he did five hundred of them in the last eighteen years of his life. The drawings are a different kind of looking than the oils. The oils stalk the sitter and accumulate the evidence of watching. The charcoals decide, in a single extended look, what the sitter most essentially is, and put it on paper without revising. Look at the Henry James charcoals and then the 1913 oil: the oil is a fuller description; the charcoal is the more honest one. For a platform interested in the economy of attention — in the minimum notation a body will accept to still be itself — the Sargent charcoals are the material. They are also a quiet rebuke to the oil industry he had spent thirty years mastering: sometimes the sitter does not need more paint.
Process
Single sitting, three hours, one sheet of wove paper, stick charcoal and a stump for blending. Sargent worked standing, on an easel, at roughly arm's length from the sitter. The face and hands are rendered carefully; the clothing is suggested in a few broad strokes and scarcely described; the background is the cream of the paper. A fixative spray fixes the final image. He charged £100 per portrait from 1907 and produced over 500 of these — after he had publicly abandoned the oil society portrait ("No more paintings of mugs") he accepted charcoal sittings as a faster, cheaper, less freighted alternative. The method's discipline is that the portrait must resolve in three hours and cannot be reworked across sittings.
Canonical works
- Charcoal portraits of British sitters (NPG London + MFA Boston — hundreds extant)
- Henry James studies (NPG; precursor to 1913 oil)
- The Acheson Sisters studies
- Ethel Smyth (c. 1901) — early example of the charcoal register
- Late-career American sitters (Boston society, ~1917–1924)
The Vela take
The Vela take: the economy of a three-hour decision — what a body will accept as still itself when the oil sittings are over.
Context
CC BY · Wikimedia Commons
Our reinterpretations
No reinterpretations are live in the library yet for this method. It is registered as sargent_charcoal_portrait@v1; the treatment file lives at lib/derivatives/treatments/sargent-charcoal-portrait.ts. Curator-promoted units will appear here as they land.
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