The Magazine Antiques

John Singer Sargent, for example, the prolific and versatile American expatriate painter based in England, enjoyed great international acclaim and patronage. By 1900, when his reputation as a portraitist reached its apogee, he had been elected a member of London's Royal Academy of Arts and New York's National Academy of Design and was an officer of the Légion d'honneur. What American painters since the earliest times had hoped for Sargent had accomplished: he had substantial patronage for his work and sufficient prestige to achieve social parity with his clients. He was thus in a position to pursue a more personal expressive agenda in his paintings. His Sketchers (Fig. 9), for example, probably painted in the summer just after the Armory Show, is a quintessential impressionist studio scene, embodying the French principles with which he had experimented by about 1878 and reflecting the freedom of the dazzling watercolors he made during his travels.13 The canvas is believed to portray Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn (1870-1951) and his wife, Jane Emmet de Glehn (1873-1961), painting outdoors in September 1913 near Lake Garda in San Vigilio, Italy, where they had joined Sargent's entourage. Detached from the claims of mundane existence, the de Glehns were absorbed in making art by transcribing nature. There is no hint of human intrusion in the landscape, no recognition of Sargent's or the viewer's presence. The Sketchers records the genteel existence that Sargent and his contemporaries enjoyed, an existence that would be forever altered by the international social and political changes wrought by World War I.14 In Sargent's sunlit San Vigilio in early autumn 1913, there is no premonition of the guns of August 1914 at Sarajevo, and no acknowledgment of the radical changes in art and culture that were challenging the identity and methods of American painters. Convinced of the authority of his profession and the merit of his practice, Sargent suggested in The Sketchers that the painter's essential task was still what it had been for Morse, Mount, Le Clear, Chase, and his other predecessors: to behold the world of familiar experience, distill from it credible and consequential stories, and share those stories with viewers.

American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915, which is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from October 12, 2009 to January 24, 2010, is organized by H. Barbara Weinberg and Carrie Rebora Barratt, both of the Metropolitan Museum, in association with E. Bruce Robertson, professor of art history, University of California, Santa Barbara, and consulting curator, Department of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Margaret C. Conrads, Samuel Sosland Curator of American Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, also contributed to the planning of the exhibition and the catalogue.

Visit www.metmuseum.org to participate in the American Stories blog and learn more about the exhibition and its catalogue. The exhibition will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from February 28 to May 23, 2010.

1 Susan Rather, "A Painter's Progress: Matthew Pratt and The American School," Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, vol. 28 (1993), p. 169.  2 Matthew Pratt quoted in Copley's letter to his stepbrother Henry Pelham, November 6, 1771, The Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739-1776 (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1914), p. 174.  3 Copley to Benjamin West or Captain R. G. Bruce, c. 1767, ibid., pp. 65-66.  4 Paul Staiti, "Character and Class" in Carrie Rebora [Barratt] et al., John Singleton Copley in America (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1995), p. 74.  5 Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2005), p. 104.  6 William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York, 1834), vol. 2, p. 317.  7 Carlton Mabee, The American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse, rev. ed. (Purple Mountain Press, Fleisch­manns, New York, 2000), pp. 226-244.  8 For accounts of the painting, see Chase Viele, "From Flames to Fame: The Sidway Double Portrait, 1865," Western New York Heritage, vol. 3 (Winter 1999), pp. 32-42; Angela Miller, "Death and Resurrection in an Artist's Studio," American Art, vol.  20, no. 1 (Spring 2006), pp. 84-95; and http://american­ art.si.edu/collections/insight/tours/leclear/index.html  9 The authors thank Andrew Walker, assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of American art, Saint Louis Art Museum, for sharing his thoughts on the content of the painting.  10 Emily Dana Shapiro, "Machine Crafted: The Image of the Artisan in American Genre Painting, 1877-1908," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2003, pp. 104-109, provides a useful account of the painting.  11 George de Forest Brush, "An Artist Among the Indians," Century Magazine, vol. 30, no. 8 (May 1885), p. 57. Alexander Nemerov, "Doing the ‘Old America,'" in The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920, ed. William H. Truettner (National Museum of American Art, Washington, 1991), pp. 323-326, discusses torpor in the painting.  12 Catalogue of International Exhibition of Modern Art, Association of American Painters and Sculptors (New York, 1913).  13 For an in-depth discussion of this picture, see Charles Merrill Mount, "A Phoenix at Richmond," Arts in Virginia, vol. 18 (Spring 1978), pp. 2-19.  14 Patricia Hills, "‘Painted Diaries': Sargent's Late Subject Pictures," in Patricia Hills et al., John Singer Sargent (Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1986), p. 203: "What Sargent wanted to see was not reality, but the holiday, aestheticized world of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries."

H. Barbara Weinberg is the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Carrie Rebora Barratt is the associate director for collections and administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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