Editing John Singer Sargent (section)

===Watercolors===
{{Commons category-inline|Watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent}}[[File:Brooklyn Museum - Gourds - John Singer Sargent.jpg|thumb|right|''Gourds'', 1906–1910, [[Brooklyn Museum]].]]

During Sargent's long career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, roving from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night.

His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a [[gondola]]. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one reviewer noted: "Everything is given with the intensity of a dream."<ref>Little (1998), p. 11.</ref> In the Middle East and North Africa Sargent painted [[Bedouins]], goatherds, and fishermen. In the last decade of his life, he produced many watercolors in [[Maine]], Florida, and in the [[American West]], of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

[[File:John Singer Sargent - The Chess Game.jpg|thumb|left|upright|''The Chess Game'', c.&nbsp;1907, Private Collection.]]

With his watercolors, Sargent was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. In watercolors, he playfully portrayed his friends and family dressed in [[Orientalism|Orientalist]] costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions (''The Chess Game'', 1906).<ref>Prettejohn (1998), pp. 66–69.</ref> His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905.<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 148.</ref> In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the [[Brooklyn Museum]].<ref name="Ormond (1998), page 276, 1998">Ormond (1998), p. 276, 1998.</ref> [[Evan Charteris]] wrote in 1927:<ref>Little (1998), p. 110.</ref>

{{blockquote|To live with Sargent's water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, "the refluent shade" and "the Ambient ardours of the noon".}}

Although not generally accorded the critical respect given [[Winslow Homer]], perhaps America's greatest watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique, including the methods used by Homer.<ref>Little (1998), p. 17.</ref>