John Singer Sargents approach to watercolour was unconventional. Disregarding late-nineteenth-century aesthetic standards that called for carefully delineated and composed landscapes filled with transparent washes, his confidently bold, dense strokes and loosely defined forms startled critics and fellow practitioners alike. One reviewer in England, where Sargent spent much of his adult life, called his work swagger watercolours. For Sargent, however, the watercolours were not so much about swagger as about a new way of thinking. In watercolour as opposed to oils his vision became more personal and his works more interconnected. Presenting nearly 100 works of art, this book is the first major publication of Sargents watercolours in twenty years. Each chapter highlights a different subject or theme that attracted the artists attention during his travels through Europe and the Middle East: sunlight on stone, figures reclining on grass, patterns of light and shadow. Insightful essays by the worlds leading experts enhance this book and introduce readers to the full sweep of Sargents accomplishments in the medium, in works that delight the eye as well as challenge our understanding of this prodigiously gifted artist.

A generously illustrated gathering of many rarely-seen watercolors by a painter best known for his oils who was also a master of the very difficult medium of watercolor. The book includes 150 4-color images, along with an introductory essay and brief section introductions.

A beguiling study of John Singer Sargent's works in watercolor, which highlights his audacious, unorthodox and modernist technique.

"The Metropolitan Museum began acquiring American drawings and watercolors in 1880, just ten years after its founding. Since then it has amassed more than 1,500 works executed by American artists during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in watercolor, pastel, chalk, ink, graphite, gouache, and charcoal. This volume documents the draftsmanship of more than 150 known artists before 1835 and that of about 60 unidentified artists of the period. It includes drawings and watercolors by such American masters as John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, George Inness, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Because the 504 works illustrate such a wide range of media, techniques, and styles, this publication is a veritable history of American drawing from the eighteenth through most of the nineteenth century."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

"An examination of how the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent was displayed, collected, and influential in the civic and cultural development of Chicago, Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--

With impressive new scholarship and many previously unpublished, color-drenched images, this gloriously beautiful book reveals a new aspect of John Singer Sargent's remarkable career. Although best known for his dazzling society portraits, Sargent's landscape oil paintings and watercolors of his travels constituted a far more important aspect of his work than previously realized--collected here in an invaluable chronology, along with letters, diaries, and photos. 250 illustrations, 200 in color.

Sargent's reputation is often defined by his remarkable achievements as a painter of sophisticated society portraits. However, as this innovative examination of his career reveals, he created a significant number of childrens portraits and genre paintings featuring children. The title of the book makes ironic reference to Charles Dickens's famous novel Great Expectations, and is used here to suggest how Sargents paintings of children related to the expectations associated with representations of childhood in the art and literature of Sargents day. The book also traces how Sargent ultimately advanced childhood as an artistic subject. The book contains five essays by three notable curators and professors of fine arts, is illustrated with Sargents truly stunning and often lesser-known paintings of children, and includes Sargent family photographs, some of which are previously unpublished.