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Lot Essay
“I am painting away very hard and shall be here a long time…” -John Singer Sargent, letter from Capri, 1878
Capri is one of John Singer Sargent’s earliest masterpieces, the radical composition and technical brilliance of the work a triumphant display of the young artist’s mastery over light. Painted in the autumn of 1878 while Sargent spent several weeks on the Italian island of Capri, the painting depicts Rosina Ferrara, Sargent’s Capresi muse, dynamically extended upon a whitewashed rooftop as she dances the tarantella to the tempo of her female companion’s tambourine. Sargent imbues the work with a veristic drama, executing each brushstroke with fluency, funneling the coloristic innovations of the Impressionists into a modern picture of a modern subject. The painting’s seminal importance is relayed by its inclusion in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions, including the 2003 exhibition Sargent and Italy at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Two closely related works are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the latter of which is currently included in the blockbuster show Sargent: Dazzling Paris at Musée d’Orsay, Paris that originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Capri exemplifies a pivotal formative period in Sargent’s career as he transitioned from his training in the Paris studio of Carolus-Duran towards a career as an internationally acclaimed society painter. “I am painting away very hard and shall be here a long time,” Sargent wrote from Capri in a letter to his oldest friend Ben del Castillo in 1878 (J. S. Sargent, quoted in E. Charteris, John Sargent, New York, 1927, p. 46). Aged only twenty-two, Sargent arrived in Capri from Paris, where he had just submitted his first genre painting to the Salon. En route pour la Pêche (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1878), depicting a quiet scene of daily life in a Breton fishing village, revitalized the popular nineteenth-century subject of peasant life with a dazzling freshness. The painting received an honorable mention and became his second sold work. Sargent landed in Capri fresh from this success and searching for similar subjects for future Salons.
Sargent had already been to Capri as a teenager, creating youthful sketches attuned to the island’s natural charms. Upon his return as a young man establishing his career, Sargent turned his keen sense of observation onto the island’s people and buildings. He lived amidst a veritable colony of anglophone and French artists on the island, including Frank Hyde and Jean Benner and he likely gained inspiration for Capri from a nighttime party he hosted for his contemporaries on the rooftop of the Marina Hotel, where he stayed. As Sargent’s friend and biographer Evan Charteris describes:
“[H]ere he imported a breath of the Latin Quarter, entertaining the artists on the island and organizing a fête in which the tarantella was danced on the flat roof of his hotel, to an orchestra of tambourines and guitars. But no entertainment in the Latin Quarter could compete with the figures of the dancers silhouetted against the violet darkness of the night under the broad illumination of the moon, the surrounding silence, the faint winds from the sea, and a supper when the stars are giving place before the first orange splash of day.” -Evan Charteris
In the present work, he isolates out from the frenzied fête his model Rosina, whom Hyde had introduced to him. Rosina hailed from Anacapri, seen in Capri as the hilltop illuminated by the moon’s regal ascension. Sargent was immediately captivated by Rosina’s striking features, describing her as “a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut-brown, with a massive of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type” (J. S. Sargent, quoted in R. Ormond, “Modern Life Subjects,” in Sargent in Italy, ed. B. Robertson, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2003, p. 52).
Here, as described at Sargent’s party, Rosina is dancing the tarantella, a fast-tempo dance originating in traditional Apulian music and popular throughout southern Italy. Inspired by the region’s unique mélange of Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Arab cultures, the tarantella appeared enticingly exotic to European tourists of the nineteenth century, figuring heavily in the Romantic imagination of the island as a timeless idyll of unvarnished beauty. Painters including Sargent’s Italian contemporary Pasquale Celommi—who studied at L’Accademia di belle arte di Firenze at the same time as Sargent—also depicted the subject. In the dance, the tambourine player and the dancer are in competition, constantly attempting to upstage the other by either playing faster or dancing longer than the other, performing until exhaustion. Sargent captures Rosina in a triumphant pose savoring victory, her opponent collapsed against the chimney in a resigned slump.
Sargent made many studies of Rosina over his time in Capri, including a bust-length portrait in profile and a full-length portrait, A Capriote, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the latter work, painted just before the present work, Sargent places Rosina in a bucolic setting, intertwining her lithe figure with that of a gnarled olive tree, her stance echoing the form of the branches, as if she was Ovid’s Daphne metamorphosizing into a laurel tree. Viewed from the same angle as in Capri and wearing the same clothes, Rosina appears relaxed in contrast to her energetic pose upon the rooftop. Painting in a more traditional style aligned with the picturesque imagery of the Barbizon School, Sargent executed three versions of the Capriote composition, exhibiting one at the Paris Salon and another in New York at the Society of American Artists.
By contrast, in Capri, Sargent constructs a radically innovative composition, reserving almost the whole foreground to depict a whitewashed wall, detailing the minute modulations in color across the shadowed and tarnished façade. A full moon peaks out above Anacapri, the island’s hilly heights, drenching the scene in a rarified reflected light of silvers and grays. Rosina and her companion animate the center of the picture, the horizon line made by the roof’s edge slowly receding toward a vanishing point just out of frame. Sargent’s naturalistic vantage point, realistically capturing the artist’s viewpoint from a nearby roof, is akin to that of the early photographs just then being popularized by European tourists in Southern Italy.
While painted to scale and placed off-center, Rosina still dominates the composition, her raised hands and extended legs expressing an energetic vitality. Her taut torso stands at parallel to the chimney, establishing a compelling orthogonal between her, the rooftop, and her companion. Prone on the roof, reclining against the chimney, the musician is every part Rosina’s opposite, contrasting the dancer’s erect posture and flowing movement with her own relaxed stance. The artist captures the vigorous movement of the tambourine’s metallic zills with a heavy impasto, expressing sound with robust dabs of paint. Sargent’s figures are rendered with bare, suggestive strokes, his economic gestures compellingly rendering his subjects silhouetted against twilight’s dim luminance. Certain elements, such as the golden earring in Rosina’s right ear, shimmer with the last reflected rays of the waning sun.
Sargent’s palette is a virtuoso demonstration of technical mastery as he marshals delicate hues of white, violet, rose, and gray into a symphonic portrayal of the twilight-bathed rooftop. Sargent’s subject and composition are alluringly modern, and the style mastered here would be developed in several of the artist’s masterpieces before the artist began to focus almost exclusively on society portraits for the remainder of the century. After finding inspiration in the unique Mediterranean light and foreign culture he witnessed on Capri, he traveled onward to Morocco and Andalusia. Sargent discovered in Tangier the same whitewashed walls and exotic attire, and his Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), painted in 1880 two years after Capri and now held in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows the artist remaining devoted to the subtle variations of white as he places his female figure, draped in exotic white fabrics, against a whitewashed wall as she perfumes herself under a brazier. Expressing myriad shades of cream, milk, pearl, and butter, Sargent paints a paean to color in this picture, presented at the 1880 Paris Salon.
Across the Pillars of Hercules, inspired by the Romani performers he observed while travelling through southern Spain, Sargent painted another depiction of a woman swaying to a quick tempo in El Jaleo, the great success of the 1882 Paris Salon now in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Analogous to Capri, El Jaleo shows a woman dancing the jaleo de jerez, a type of flamenco. Her raised arms, glimmering white skirt, and erect posture as she leans backward while simultaneously stepping forward establishes several continuities with the Capri rooftop, and his model’s vividity juxtaposed with the repose exhibited by her musical companions recalls the contrast between Rosina and her recumbent accompanist.
Capri is one of John Singer Sargent’s earliest masterpieces, anticipating two of his greatest Salon pictures. Already in this early moment Sargent exhibits his stunning understanding of light, employing almost solely shades of white to create a dazzling composition that evokes the sounds and delights of a young artist’s exploration of new cultures and inspirations, which would form the basis for the remainder of his storied career.
Capri is one of John Singer Sargent’s earliest masterpieces, the radical composition and technical brilliance of the work a triumphant display of the young artist’s mastery over light. Painted in the autumn of 1878 while Sargent spent several weeks on the Italian island of Capri, the painting depicts Rosina Ferrara, Sargent’s Capresi muse, dynamically extended upon a whitewashed rooftop as she dances the tarantella to the tempo of her female companion’s tambourine. Sargent imbues the work with a veristic drama, executing each brushstroke with fluency, funneling the coloristic innovations of the Impressionists into a modern picture of a modern subject. The painting’s seminal importance is relayed by its inclusion in many of the artist’s most important exhibitions, including the 2003 exhibition Sargent and Italy at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Two closely related works are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, the latter of which is currently included in the blockbuster show Sargent: Dazzling Paris at Musée d’Orsay, Paris that originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Capri exemplifies a pivotal formative period in Sargent’s career as he transitioned from his training in the Paris studio of Carolus-Duran towards a career as an internationally acclaimed society painter. “I am painting away very hard and shall be here a long time,” Sargent wrote from Capri in a letter to his oldest friend Ben del Castillo in 1878 (J. S. Sargent, quoted in E. Charteris, John Sargent, New York, 1927, p. 46). Aged only twenty-two, Sargent arrived in Capri from Paris, where he had just submitted his first genre painting to the Salon. En route pour la Pêche (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1878), depicting a quiet scene of daily life in a Breton fishing village, revitalized the popular nineteenth-century subject of peasant life with a dazzling freshness. The painting received an honorable mention and became his second sold work. Sargent landed in Capri fresh from this success and searching for similar subjects for future Salons.
Sargent had already been to Capri as a teenager, creating youthful sketches attuned to the island’s natural charms. Upon his return as a young man establishing his career, Sargent turned his keen sense of observation onto the island’s people and buildings. He lived amidst a veritable colony of anglophone and French artists on the island, including Frank Hyde and Jean Benner and he likely gained inspiration for Capri from a nighttime party he hosted for his contemporaries on the rooftop of the Marina Hotel, where he stayed. As Sargent’s friend and biographer Evan Charteris describes:
“[H]ere he imported a breath of the Latin Quarter, entertaining the artists on the island and organizing a fête in which the tarantella was danced on the flat roof of his hotel, to an orchestra of tambourines and guitars. But no entertainment in the Latin Quarter could compete with the figures of the dancers silhouetted against the violet darkness of the night under the broad illumination of the moon, the surrounding silence, the faint winds from the sea, and a supper when the stars are giving place before the first orange splash of day.” -Evan Charteris
In the present work, he isolates out from the frenzied fête his model Rosina, whom Hyde had introduced to him. Rosina hailed from Anacapri, seen in Capri as the hilltop illuminated by the moon’s regal ascension. Sargent was immediately captivated by Rosina’s striking features, describing her as “a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut-brown, with a massive of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type” (J. S. Sargent, quoted in R. Ormond, “Modern Life Subjects,” in Sargent in Italy, ed. B. Robertson, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2003, p. 52).
Here, as described at Sargent’s party, Rosina is dancing the tarantella, a fast-tempo dance originating in traditional Apulian music and popular throughout southern Italy. Inspired by the region’s unique mélange of Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Arab cultures, the tarantella appeared enticingly exotic to European tourists of the nineteenth century, figuring heavily in the Romantic imagination of the island as a timeless idyll of unvarnished beauty. Painters including Sargent’s Italian contemporary Pasquale Celommi—who studied at L’Accademia di belle arte di Firenze at the same time as Sargent—also depicted the subject. In the dance, the tambourine player and the dancer are in competition, constantly attempting to upstage the other by either playing faster or dancing longer than the other, performing until exhaustion. Sargent captures Rosina in a triumphant pose savoring victory, her opponent collapsed against the chimney in a resigned slump.
Sargent made many studies of Rosina over his time in Capri, including a bust-length portrait in profile and a full-length portrait, A Capriote, now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the latter work, painted just before the present work, Sargent places Rosina in a bucolic setting, intertwining her lithe figure with that of a gnarled olive tree, her stance echoing the form of the branches, as if she was Ovid’s Daphne metamorphosizing into a laurel tree. Viewed from the same angle as in Capri and wearing the same clothes, Rosina appears relaxed in contrast to her energetic pose upon the rooftop. Painting in a more traditional style aligned with the picturesque imagery of the Barbizon School, Sargent executed three versions of the Capriote composition, exhibiting one at the Paris Salon and another in New York at the Society of American Artists.
By contrast, in Capri, Sargent constructs a radically innovative composition, reserving almost the whole foreground to depict a whitewashed wall, detailing the minute modulations in color across the shadowed and tarnished façade. A full moon peaks out above Anacapri, the island’s hilly heights, drenching the scene in a rarified reflected light of silvers and grays. Rosina and her companion animate the center of the picture, the horizon line made by the roof’s edge slowly receding toward a vanishing point just out of frame. Sargent’s naturalistic vantage point, realistically capturing the artist’s viewpoint from a nearby roof, is akin to that of the early photographs just then being popularized by European tourists in Southern Italy.
While painted to scale and placed off-center, Rosina still dominates the composition, her raised hands and extended legs expressing an energetic vitality. Her taut torso stands at parallel to the chimney, establishing a compelling orthogonal between her, the rooftop, and her companion. Prone on the roof, reclining against the chimney, the musician is every part Rosina’s opposite, contrasting the dancer’s erect posture and flowing movement with her own relaxed stance. The artist captures the vigorous movement of the tambourine’s metallic zills with a heavy impasto, expressing sound with robust dabs of paint. Sargent’s figures are rendered with bare, suggestive strokes, his economic gestures compellingly rendering his subjects silhouetted against twilight’s dim luminance. Certain elements, such as the golden earring in Rosina’s right ear, shimmer with the last reflected rays of the waning sun.
Sargent’s palette is a virtuoso demonstration of technical mastery as he marshals delicate hues of white, violet, rose, and gray into a symphonic portrayal of the twilight-bathed rooftop. Sargent’s subject and composition are alluringly modern, and the style mastered here would be developed in several of the artist’s masterpieces before the artist began to focus almost exclusively on society portraits for the remainder of the century. After finding inspiration in the unique Mediterranean light and foreign culture he witnessed on Capri, he traveled onward to Morocco and Andalusia. Sargent discovered in Tangier the same whitewashed walls and exotic attire, and his Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), painted in 1880 two years after Capri and now held in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, shows the artist remaining devoted to the subtle variations of white as he places his female figure, draped in exotic white fabrics, against a whitewashed wall as she perfumes herself under a brazier. Expressing myriad shades of cream, milk, pearl, and butter, Sargent paints a paean to color in this picture, presented at the 1880 Paris Salon.
Across the Pillars of Hercules, inspired by the Romani performers he observed while travelling through southern Spain, Sargent painted another depiction of a woman swaying to a quick tempo in El Jaleo, the great success of the 1882 Paris Salon now in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Analogous to Capri, El Jaleo shows a woman dancing the jaleo de jerez, a type of flamenco. Her raised arms, glimmering white skirt, and erect posture as she leans backward while simultaneously stepping forward establishes several continuities with the Capri rooftop, and his model’s vividity juxtaposed with the repose exhibited by her musical companions recalls the contrast between Rosina and her recumbent accompanist.
Capri is one of John Singer Sargent’s earliest masterpieces, anticipating two of his greatest Salon pictures. Already in this early moment Sargent exhibits his stunning understanding of light, employing almost solely shades of white to create a dazzling composition that evokes the sounds and delights of a young artist’s exploration of new cultures and inspirations, which would form the basis for the remainder of his storied career.