Sargent Again

Found another huge volume, an art book in it's own right, but also the exhibition catalog of a giant retrospective of the artist's work, staged by the Whitney Museum Of American Art in 1986. Wonderful long essays about the different periods in Sargent's life, with the proper illustrations in their place. Spent all morning reading and referencing (many trips up and down the stairs to the library, before I just moved down there, and set up shop) about the times he had spent with Monet in both Paris and Giverny, 1886-87. S's technique is almost orthodox Impressionism during that period. Except that the brushstroke isn't quite as broken, and he never stopped using a lot of black paint. Walking with M one day (and an art dealer from Paris), he hadn't brought his own paints along, and asked to borrow M's. Fine. He burrowed in the canvas satchel and asked where was the black paint. Monet said he didn't use black paint and Sargent was mortified. I hadn't paid much attention to this period before, but when you look at the painting (1887) S did of M, "Claude Monet Painting At The Edge Of A Wood" you see it clearly. My up close and personal introduction to Sargent was at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, when I was working at the Opera Company there. Isabella had been a great fan, collected his work from almost the beginning, she sat for him, in 1922, for a watercolor portrait, died two years, later, he died three years later; was only painting then, he said, as a sort of occupational therapy. I walk a few deserted streets, nobody anywhere, and everything is closed; which they should be, which is fine, I'm only walking to take the air. Below the floodwall I smell something dead and I walk the edge of the river around to where the Scioito flows into the Ohio. There's a large dead sturgeon that stinks to high heaven, which I push back into the river with a stick. Push the problem, as they say, downstream. Sturgeon scales are called scutes. I don't know what that means. Probably Old English, or Coptic or something. Language kills me.