Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.
A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.
Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.
Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.
Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.
The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.
On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.
This gets my Major Timesink Warning.
Enjoy.
