Sargent's Watercolour Wonders

With the first UK show of his work in the medium in more than 100 years opening in June, Sally Hales talks to Richard Ormond , the artist’s grand-nephew and the exhibition’s co-curator, about what the paintings meant to the man and his craft

- Sally Hales

The Anglo-American artist perches uncomfortably on a steep slope of the Simplon Pass, high in the Swiss Alps, feet wedged precariously against rocks. Brush and palette in hand, and surrounded by the high-tech kit of the times – telescopic easel, paintbox – he looks rather more like an Edwardian explorer than the most famous society portrait painter of his age.

Yet John Singer Sargent, celebrated for the luminous, technical brilliance of his oil portraits, worked en plein air in watercolor throughout his life. Indeed, in his later years, he painted in the medium almost obsessively on regular travels through Europe and beyond. The resulting works, however, have often been dismissed as mere travel souvenirs. Now, a show at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery – the first UK exhibition of Sargent’s watercolors in more than 100 years – is set to overturn that impression. “I always think the watercolors have been underplayed,” says Richard Ormond, the artist’s grand-nephew and an art historian who has co-curated Sargent: The Watercolors, which runs from 21 June to 8 October 2017, with Elaine Kilmurray. The exhibition collects more than 80 works from 30 lenders – many never before seen in public – to showcase the painter’s fluency in watercolor, as well as highlight the seriousness with which he took the medium. “He put a lot of effort into them and, in his later years, he was as much a watercolorist as he was an oil painter.”