Sargent at the Met

There is a huge Sargent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and I had been hoping all year to get up there and see it. I was just about to give up because of health and logistics, but I felt better several days in a row and decided to just go for it last minute. It was SUCH a good decision. And I was lucky to be flexible and able to go last minute. I spent Monday to Friday in New York, home on Saturday, and I just drank in art. I went ahead and joined the Met both to support a great museum and so I could go in and out at will. And hopefully I'll go back again and use it some more in the next year.

The Sargent show was great, a wide selection of work from the earlier part of his career, the part where he was based in Paris. He was ridiculously prolific, and there were many I'd never even seen reproductions of. There were a bunch in private collections but also old friends I've seen in other places in other years.

I found benches and sat and sketched a good bit, also just sat and looked deeply. The gallery sketches are all Derwent Inktense pencils. The NY museums have a pencil only policy, and I love the Inktense ones because they have more depth and saturation than most pencils. They're made with ink instead of watercolor, and when you put a little water on them (I usually use a water brush for a blender), they really pop. I tend to get in the habit of drawing with fountain pens at home, so it's fun to mix up texture and use the pencils sometime.

I enjoyed drawing people with the art a few times, including that first full length portrait of the doctor in the super saturated red. After lunch I went back in and drew the Daughters of Edward Droit, one of my favorite Sargent portraits anywhere (aside from Lady Agnew in the Scottish National Gallery). I had seen it in Boston a decade ago and been completely blown away by the composition as well as the beauty of the brushstrokes. I drew it straight up, just looking deeply and enjoying the painting.

Toward the end of the day I wandered through the American wing and saw a father and son in blue stripes and checks hanging out in front of an orange Helen Frankenthaler. It was a wonderful sight. It took me a couple of minutes to get out my book and pencils, so it's a super fast sketch as they moved on out, but I was happy with feel of it.