John Singer Sargent's REAL Plein Air Painting Technique - Simplon Pass Breakdown

Today I'm going to be diving into the plein air technique of one of my favorite old master painters, John Singer Sargent. This is not an original John Singer Sargent. This is a master copy. I found out that there is an incredibly high resolution image of it. I made the painting, and I recorded the process, and that's on my Patreon. Today we're going to be focusing on the actual reproduction, breaking down his technique and what we can see from this incredibly, incredibly detailed image that we have of it. I'm going to be explaining how I came to these conclusions, and I'm also going to be adding a little bit of context of what I actually know about his technique from other sources. By the end of this video, you'll have learned a few things about John Singer Sargent's real technique, and next time you look at a painting, it's going to be a bit less mysterious for you. Now to the actual painting. Here we have the National Gallery of Art's website. To access the high resolution image, you just have to click it. You wait a little bit for it to load, and here we are. And now we can zoom in, and you can see just how insane this is. Breaking down this painting, I'm going to start somewhat at the beginning, meaning how did he start this painting? What were his first steps? Very first thing before you set a brush mark, you are met with a blank canvas, but it's not always blank. At times, there's what we call a tone or an imprimatura on the canvas. So this is just an even tone that is covering the painting. It eliminates the white of the canvas. If you're looking at a painting, how can you tell if the artist used a tone or if they're working on a white surface? Well, you need to look usually towards the edges of the painting. Here in this really high resolution image, we can look down at any of these edges. So this is the bottom left corner of this painting, and we see it seems very consistent happening underneath all these little bits of paint. There's this little bit of orange-ish brown peeking through, and it looks really consistent. We see it here. We see it over here, over here. And as we move on over, it actually exists kind of all throughout the edge of this canvas. This brown tone is a little bit unusual from the typical tone that Sargent would most often use that I've encountered. He would most often work on a neutral gray tone. We see this in Lady Agnew. We see this in The Master and His Pupils and other portrait studies. But just because one artist had a tendency to work one way, that never means he doesn't stray or experiment his style or his technique with other tendencies. What's the use of a tone? Why work on a tone at all? Employing an undertone or an impermature in your oil painting tackles one of the most challenging problems in painting. It eliminates the white of your surface. It can be tricky or challenging working on a white surface because every time you put a brush mark down, that brush mark will look really dark compared to the white of your surface until the entire surface is dark, and sometimes that can skew our perception. If we look at Sargent's work as a whole, he had a tendency to work out from his middles, from his middle tones, and he would work out towards the extremes of his values. And so having this tone, I believe, it helped Sargent perceive his color much more effectively. How does he proceed from here? This is a pretty big canvas in real life. My canvas is a lot smaller. That's mostly because I made it to fit this 19th century frame. It's very unlikely that he was to paint this entire thing in a day. We can also be sure of that by looking at the texture. We see some visible brush marks on the surface of this painting, but underneath them there's a texture that doesn't relate to whatever is on the surface. Now that's a telltale sign of layering, working on a painting on multiple sessions. When working on a painting wet into wet, that doesn't really happen. Throughout this painting, there are a number of really interesting examples of where Sargent worked wet into wet, or wet on dry, or dry on dry. We can see evidence where Sargent was applying the paint much more thinly to begin with. Again, let's look at the edges of the canvas. So if we look down in the edges over here, we see that all of this paint is applied much more thinly because it's lacking texture. Most often, from what I've seen in his paintings, he would start out roughing in the canvas in this sort of a fashion where we don't see all that much texture, especially in the shadow of this rock, blocking things in, just adding variety, going for color. This shadow is relatively thinly painted. It looks like this is also that brown undertone. So throughout the painting, there are parts of the painting which are just the tone of the canvas, just this brown that we see at the corners. Of course, that's another big reason to try out a tone of the canvas, because sometimes you go through a painting and you've got all these little tiny dots that are just peeking through where you didn't quite cover the surface. It's really, really annoying. So I would imagine that Sargent started working this painting, drawing in, working from the big masses, the big shapes of color, establishing his big darks, his big lights, saving his accents for last, and establishing the key of his painting, working relatively thinly to start. As he was getting more in the lights, and this is partly because of lead white, lead has a really low tinting strength, so that means to mix a color with lead white, you need to mix a lot of it, and that's part of the reason that all of the lighter passages in a painting will typically be a little bit more textured. A little bit about Sargent's typical materials before we start getting into how he was actually painting this painting. Sargent was painting in a time before the invention of titanium white. There was a point in time where all oil painters used lead white. For his mediums, he often employed, and this is well cited, linseed oil and turpentine. He would paint very simply, he didn't have any special mediums, except there are some sources of certain projects where he worked with something called maguilpe, which is a combination of leaded oil and varnish. I'm not sure if he used maguilpe on this, but from what I can tell, very obvious signs that he was using lead, and also very obvious signs that he probably was thinning it down and cutting it a little bit with solvents. When we think of wet passages of oil paint or dry passages of oil paint, it doesn't always mean that the painting is fully dry or fully wet. What that sometimes means is the consistency of the paint that's being used. Paint itself, as a medium, it's just composed of pigment and oil as a binder. That oil is commonly linseed oil, and some people use that for a medium, that's what I use most often, I don't really use that many solvents in my own practice. When you're mixing paint, the more oil a paint has, the more runny it is, the more it blends into each other. The less oil it has, it feels much more like a paste to it, it doesn't really spread as easily. Solvents, specifically turpentine, so dries the painting out and it spreads and it thins the painting out. Now, I'm going to start pointing out where we see evidences of what he was doing differently with different parts of his painting. Overall, Sargent was a very direct painter, he really went right for the scene, he didn't work up from and under painting like other painters would. Most often times, Sargent would start with slightly thinner washes, fully covering the canvas, using a lot of paint, and just going for the full image right away. Now to circle back into wet into wet, dry on dry, wet on dry, what does that all actually mean? Wet into wet is when you're painting, some people say alla prima, but alla prima just means that you are limited to one session, you are painting things in one go. A lot of Sargent's paintings are kind of alla prima because he would always work the entire painting or sometimes even scrape things down and rework them. I don't really think he was doing much scraping down in this painting because there's a lot of evidence of the underlying texture, but I think there are passages of it which are much more obvious when he's painting wet into wet. Whenever things start to blend in to each other really clearly, so you can see that over here in this passage, this looks like a passage which had a little bit more solvent included in the paint, things were a little bit more wet. This looks a little bit like a stain on the canvas rather than a bunch of paint caked on top of it, but the edges fuse and blend in to the paint that's surrounding it. Sargent was painting wet into wet in most of the painting, so when we look at the foreground at the very bottom of the canvas, it looks like most of this is painted wet into wet. There are some parts where we can tell when the brush strokes are broken, when they aren't blending smoothly into the surrounding areas, the way that it has a jagged edge as it sits right on top of this underlying layer, that is a sign that this paint was wet and the layer underneath it was dry. But most of this, when we look closely at how this paint was actually being mixed in together, is wet into wet. A lot of other areas, let's look at these rocks. So this rock in shadow is painted mostly wet into wet, but fairly thinly, so there was a lot more solvent, there was a lot less oil. In other passages such as back here, it looks like this was all painted fairly wet into wet. All of these passages in the distant mountains, they all fairly blend in together. And there looks like there's a little bit of evidence of layering where there is some texture that is happening that does not quite relate to the color that we see. It's possible that some of these shadows, like these deeper purples, were scumbled in a little bit, worked a little bit transparently over an underlying layer, except for the light on these cliffs. The light on these cliffs is obviously a second layer. When we see such clean passages of paint where the paint doesn't mix with the underlying paint at all, that's usually a telltale sign of working wet over dry or even dry over dry. Dry brushing. That's one of the key things in this painting was Sargent's use of what I call dry brushing. We see a lot of dry brushing in here, but also in the bottom of the waterfall. We see how Sargent cakes on this paint on top of a seemingly dry layer. And what that means is Sargent was using relatively dry paint, meaning the paint did not have a lot of oil or did not have a high solvent content. It was mostly the pigment. It was mostly a paste-like mixture. The way that you can actually apply that is somewhat like a watercolor technique, using the side of your brush with a bunch of dry, not liquidy, so more pasty paint, and you simply take that brush and you drag it along the surface, and the underlying textures, so the texture of the canvas, but also the texture that you've been building up over the sessions, will catch that paint in a lot of interesting ways. So we see that quite obviously here. The fact that this paint doesn't really mix into it looks like it was much more dry brush. There are some instances where it looks like it might have been more mixed. There are some layers where passages such as this can only be painted wet into wet. And then down here, this ground, oh this is crazy. There's a whole lot of stuff happening here. There's a lot of layering. There's a lot of really heavy mark making, really dry paint, dragging it across, a lot of broken color. Again, definitely second, third layer, in my opinion. Back here in the mid-ground, there's a lot of evidence where the brush marks just really don't relate to what's happening underneath. Maybe Sargent was fixing his drawing. Maybe he was making some design changes in the painting, but he was obviously really painting over it. The sky's really interesting. It looks like the sky was painted fairly consistently. There isn't a whole lot of texture that we see underneath it. However, when we look at the clouds, the clouds have a little bit of transparency, especially in certain areas such as down in here. We see little bits of the blue coming through the white. I would say the reason for that in these areas, and also considering that there's all this blue that is actually mixing fairly well into the white. Some of this blue doesn't look like it was perfectly dry when these clouds were painted. I would say that this was a passage where Sargent painted in the entire blue of the sky, but decided to add the clouds on top in the same session. One of the things that happens over the course of a painting session, especially if you might be using a medium containing turpentine, or miguilpe, miguilpe also contains turpentine I believe, they're fast-drying mediums. Lead white is also a very fast-drying pigment because different pigments in oil paint behave differently, they have different drying times, they have different consistencies out of the tube. Lead is typically very fast-drying, very thick, very textured, depending on the brand, very pasty. It has other thixotropic properties, which are, it gets more texture the more you work it. This painting of the sky looks like it was painted in to a semi-dry layer, and especially when the paint sort of grabs in certain passages, when the paint is somewhat mixing but somewhat grabbing in, that looks like he's using very heavy paint, so very dry, not very liquidy paint, and he's mixing that into the semi-dry layer that is partially dried after an hour or two hours of working in. It's a very direct way of working, there's not a whole lot of bells and whistles, but it's by mostly using a lot of paint selectively. Not thinning it out too much, but actually letting that paint grab onto the wet or semi-dry paint that's already there, it creates a lot of really interesting texture in the painting. And so I'd say that looks fairly different from the mountain cliffs below it. When we look at these mountain cliffs, we can see that the paint is being dry-brushed and it's catching all this texture. This type of texture can only really be formed after the painting is fully dry, because we see some really large marks of texture that are being caught. And the final finishing touches, you know, some of the final finishing touches that were the juiciest were the dappled lighting on some of these rocks, so you can see how the dappled lighting just sits so cleanly on this rock in shadow. It looks like he painted the rocks in shadow first, and then he picked out the dappled light afterwards. It's really clean, it's really fresh, it's really juicy. Sometimes artists go above and beyond in their use of texture. They use a whole lot of texture, and they make really textured paintings on purpose. Sargent wasn't so finicky. A lot of his plein air paintings, you see that he was really just going for the color and the light, and he was letting the texture follow. He wasn't concerned about the texture first and foremost. And I should mention that one of the other reasons why I was really drawn to this painting is partly the way that Sargent saw the world, the way that he saw it to be colorful, and that he was trying to paint things to be their most colorful extreme. In his letters, he talked about how his paints were never colorful enough to capture the fleeting effects while he was painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. I think the way that Sargent worked had a really important impact on how he saw the world. When Sargent worked on most of his portraits, he would often step back as far as he can across the room. There are a lot of firsthand accounts of Sargent's rug being worn out in a single line across the room as he would walk back and forth from his easel, just to see the painting as far as he could, just to see the big impression. Now, there's a certain thing that happens when you stand that far back from your painting that I've noticed over time. What happens is that you start to forget your ideas of what is light, what is dark in your painting. You start to forget all these relationships of, okay, this is my lightest light, this is my darkest dark in my painting, and that's the lightest light, and that's the darkest dark in my subject matter. What happens when you step far enough back from that and your painting is by the model and it's in the same light, you start to realize that you are painting on a flat surface with dirt. You are painting on a flat surface with colored pigment, and you are trying to get a dimensionality and represent light and color. Sargent's reaction to that, he would compensate and expand his color range. So the really special thing about the way that this painting was painted is just how expansive the colors are. Just how pure blue of a sky, the depth of the blue in some of these shadows, the oranges and blues that are interplaying right up against each other in the rocks and in the foreground, the way that we have almost pure Viridian butting up against almost pure burnt sienna. Sargent really pushed the color in this painting. I think that is one of the main reasons that a lot of us love John Singer Sargent's paintings so much because they look so special, the color looks so amazing, but it works and it's still refined, it's not overdone. That is one of the reasons that I did a copy of it because that's one of the things that I want to work on in my own paintings and I want to push my color sense and I want to capture more of the light that I see. It's a really incredible painting to look at. It was really fun and challenging to actually try to paint it when I made this copy. If you guys want to see the full painting process of when I actually tried to tackle this painting and make a little copy of it myself, that is on my Patreon. It's the whole process, more than two hours of edited footage and I also have a lot of other plein air painting tutorials out there and if you guys ever want to study with me in person, take an in-person workshop, I have a mailing list also for that. Hope you guys enjoyed the video and catch you next time.