 Welcome everyone. We anticipated a fair amount of excitement around the exhibition, John Singer Sgt. Watercolors, and we're not being disappointed if tonight is any indication, so we're thrilled you're all here with us. By way of further introduction of Richard, I just want to say that artistic reputations are based essentially on the quality and greatness of the art, but their continuation is based on a nurturing process that can span decades and even centuries, and no one has contributed more to the sustenance of Sgt. Reputation than Richard in years of amazing research and documentation. And what you see on the screen right now are images of the first seven volumes of the catalogue Grayson A, seven, and they are not little books. They are not primarily picture books. They are amazing reference books about an amazing career. And Richard is joined in his work by a team of people here tonight, the Sgt. Catalogue people. You want to just raise your hand? Elizabeth Ustinoff, Elaine Kilmury, and Lauren Adelson. And before we start, I also want to ask my co-curator Erica to stand for a second and say hello to everyone. I think that part of what generates the enthusiasm we're experiencing tonight is a tremendous pride of ownership of this part of the Brooklyn Museum Collection, which has been here since 1909. And since that time it has been considered one of the great treasures and gems of our entire holdings. And it's absolutely remarkable to see everything out and together and merged with the contents of the second early purchase of watercolors in 1912 by the MFA Boston. I hope you visit the exhibition tonight and repeatedly and read the catalogue. But tonight we're going to chat with Richard to gain more of a sense of Sgt. the man that he has really uncovered as part of his remarkable research and owing in part as well to his personal connections. And we're going to talk about three general subjects, the first being Sgt. family and their role in his art making. Also Sgt. amazing entourage of friends who also were very much apart, particularly of the watercolors. And then finally some of Sgt. travels and the places he painted because Richard has I think virtually traced all of those pathways at this point. So welcome. Thank you. And we're going to start by considering Sgt. studio in London and the fact that at the time of his death in 1925 there were hundreds and hundreds of watercolors there. There were. And one should just say this is 31 Tide Street which is still there has been lovingly restored by its new owners and has regained its character once more. He also had a studio of 33 Tide Street. And you can see here some of the props and some of the furniture which appears in his portraits and his piano. He was a great musician and there's the sitter's stand top right with the fact you can't really see it. But there's a piece of a buzzery French 18th century paneling which he used to deploy in his portraits. And the gramophone he was used to regale his sitters often with Spanish music. And you can see here he's got on bottom left. He's preparing to do a charcoal portrait. And in the middle is the stereoscopic viewer for photographs. And I think we're going to see a photograph or two. He was very interested in the medium of photography and took the stereoscopic which when you look at through the the Vera scope gives you a 3D effect. And the furniture too all rather French and sort of empire Louis says very much the kind of things that all his clients were going in for the fashionable French Rococo 18th century style. And that was very much his kind of style he admired very much. So and of course a lot of these props appear in the portraits. And in one of the volumes we detail all the different accessories that he used. And it was full of watercolors in great portfolios because originally he wouldn't sell anything rather to the dismay of friends and collectors who said well can we buy these. And Mr. Sergeant used to say no I really do these for myself. And he said on one occasion when I'm painting somebody like Lord London for a great grandee I need to remind myself that you know I'm not a complete duffer. So these watercolors were very important to him and it was really only there was three big one-man shows in London 1993 1995 1998. Nothing was for sale and it was only when he sent them over to Brooklyn he was very reluctant to bring them over. It was too much hassle you know they weren't and he said at the time I won't sell to individual collectors but if an institution were to be interested then then I would do it and that's and Brooklyn came forward and and then Boston was terribly miffed that they'd been beaten to the post and they they put a sort of lean on him and said well next time Mr. Sergeant you jolly well going to you're going to let us have first crack of the whip. And so he was conscious I think when he was doing the Boston lot that these were going to an institution which is why then in general they are on a larger slightly larger scale they're a bit more finished bit more like presentation watercolors whereas the Brooklyn were a sort of gathering of the over a longer course of time but the house was and the same with oil paintings and in spite of these two big sales he did let he gave things away particularly his wedding presents and to friends fellow artists so he gave a lot away but at the end you know his two sisters who inherited all these things they had a big sergeant sale in 1925 and about a hundred of the watercolors were put in my grandfather wanted to persuade the sisters to put in everything because he realized that you know sergeant prices this was the moment to go and this sale which included oil paintings made about nearly half a million dollars in real terms which goodness knows what that is in today's terms so it was the moment to strike but even with that they were still left with an enormous number of things and they gave away in the 1930s to the MFA in Boston and to the fog hundreds of sheets of drawings of watercolors and they gave an even bigger my grandmother in 1950 Francis Taylor the then director of the Met sort of squirreled out of her you know another few hundred drawings and watercolors and I don't think anybody's fully and they gave to left right and center to smaller institutions anybody has realized the scale of these gifts from the two sisters and even so quite a lot came down through the family and I remember going to my grandmother's flat in Chelsea which was just covered from floor to ceiling with they framed oh they were all framed yes they got framed sergeant never bothered to frame them because they in and actually one of the things was he said but I'm you know I've got to frame these and that's a tremendous bore and I've got to go to the console to get the papers I've got to go to this people it's all too much hassle and you realize that he was having to do all this himself he didn't have a staff he didn't have a staff you know staff and he all his it's calling it's very difficult letter writer I mean he scrolls letters I mean and also it's very unbusiness like often he has rights to people to say I'm not quite sure if I've had your check or not could you could you please let me know so Richard you mentioned portfolios of watercolors were they grouped in any specific way or I don't think so no I mean I think when he chose the you know he had an idea of what was his really and when he did them for the Carfax gallery I think those were the things he really cared about and he did exhibit every year at the Royal Watercolor Society where of course his his work sort of blew everything else off the walls you know because they weren't kind of traditional English watercolors you know these big bold splashy watercolors you know were but I don't think he had I don't know that it's interesting whether he had any I mean he certainly of course he's a sequential painter you know he serial painter like Monet with the water lilies or Cezanne I mean he's a serial painter variations on and what and he certainly when he talked to them about the Brooklyn to Nerdler because he said oh well mr dear mr Boyd because it was a joint exhibition you do it all don't you know you hang it just because he didn't come over you hang it as you want and then he said oh by the way well I think the Bedouin things will be rather nice and you might think of starting with Venice or whatever and so he was kind of calling the shots from from a distance so let's talk a little bit about some of the very very important family members and perhaps most important is sergeant sister Emily oh yes we have two photos here one of Emily with her friend Eliza Wedgewood in a gondola in Venice and on the right Emily watching sergeant painting hovering one might say you could never miss aunt Emily because she's always there in black and they were brought up together in I mean it's a very odd upbringing they were both born in Europe and brought up in that kind of migrant existence moving with the seasons from the south and then as the weather improved you came north and so and you met a few other expatriates doing the same sort of routine but they were very much thrown together on their own resources and they were only a year apart and I think always sergeant had a very warm feeling and protective feeling to his sister she had a sort of dis disablement her back was not straight and I think her mother had seized on Emily as the daughter who was going to look after her and so in a certain sense has so many of daughters were sacrificial victims but sergeant always I think and she absolutely doted on him and she was a very I mean she could have been she was very musical like him there was a thought that she might go and study music in Dresden and but I'm afraid the mum put a stop to that and so you will feel she never but she was a very talented water colorist in her own right there are several hundred sheets and she really deserves to there she is but with the two nieces you can't miss her yes with the brush in her mouth with a brush so she was but she never exhibited but she was prolific and they often painted side by side what they painted side by side yes very often and she was invariably the person who went with him on his on his sketching expedition she was a familiar figure and it's a very somebody described her as the wife he never had really because you know she was and in Chelsea she lived just around the corner from him and he used to go around every day and she would entertain for him you know the friends and everything else so it was a very touching relationship really and was she prolific as well in terms of the number of watercolors she executed yes and there are some that which have on the back with sergeant's help where he would add afterwards he kind of pep them up you know so but and she she never complained she always had a she always looked on the bright side of things she had a great she's highly intelligent very sharp didn't suffer fools gladly she had a real gift for friendship and she really in spite of that you might think you know being limited and living with mother and all that but she never she made the most of life as intrepid as he was she was as intrepid as he was yes she was in her own way yes she's a remarkable character unfortunately i didn't never knew her because in my grandmother was 14 years younger and my father was her the youngest child so it's really like a double and she was knocked over by a bicycle in Zurich and died in consequence 1936 so about 10 years after him and there you see him as somebody said looking like a chicken just emerging from an egg with with with all his painting umbrellas large and stout and there he is in the act of out in the mountains sergeant also had this entourage of friends who were with him yeah he liked to be surrounded by yes by um uh his particularly in the alps his family you know the nephews and nieces and his sisters and other friends and then when he went the pattern was to start in the alps in august then he would go to Venice and meet up with fellow artists and then they would either decide to go to Mallorca Corfu southern Spain Rome Frascati whatever it might be and so there were two or three months each year um he was taking out to uh from portrait painting and mural painting um and there you see a group at the sampland um uh and the figure i want to point out is peter harrison top yeah the one seated is peter harrison who's the one lounging in the bed here i love this picture he's much too tall for the bed and he's smoking a pipe and i love this sort of intimate view of his in a several of this sort of this uh of its friends in bed in these in that with all that great um boasters you get in in uh in swiss hotels and when we were thinking about yes and they are in the middle of the bay the sergeant is on the wall behind with his hand like that and then in front of him is ambrodio raffaele who's uh uh an italian painter he met in portue came from vigivano town in northern italy and that i've just come across or been by uh somebody's writing a book a whole lot of letters from raffaele to another friend describing his experiences in um in with sergeant whom he deeply admired um in the sampland in portue and he and two other italians they they spent several seasons in the valet ester and then they followed sergeant up to the sampland so they were sort of um perennial friends what was interesting when we were thinking about some of these reclining figures was looking for other bed imagery from this looking for bed imagery oh bed imagery yes and it's actually quite rare yeah there's that fantastic oil painting here in his studio which is raffaele who's actually not painting on plein air i mean usually sergeant is paints his fellow artists in the act of painting landscape and you feel it's often a kind of autobiography because it's you know it's sergeant painting somebody else painting but um that's an incredible picture because he squashed in with this huge great picture in this very small bedroom and then there's this huge great bed and sumptuously the sheets are the most beautiful part of the picture and it's sort of you know the inner inner world of the artist and the private man you know you can imagine the every picture being put away and raffaele getting into his night shirt which is thrown over the end of the bed and climbing into that huge great bed yes i think one of the most remarkable things is how many seasons all these people spent together year after year that it was something they clearly all loved and they loved being part of the process and sergeant's work and the experience and um they were real painting expeditions he didn't go on holiday and just happened to sketch right he went on holiday or he didn't he went to other countries to paint they were painting campaigns but he also loved playing music because he was so intensely musical and he was very very widely read and i've just recently catalogued um his french library um which was several hundred volumes it's very very and french literature he really preferred to english literature voltaire and then the contemporary people like Baudelaire and and um flow band valet and so he's and then they would have a play chess and read and but daytime he's out on the you know wherever it is uh areas uh poor too yes quite interesting i when i went there i couldn't find the brook because the brook is features in numerous pictures both with the with figures and also just the brook and actually it's one of the few i mean most of the things that sergeant painted is still there because he painted tended to paint old buildings and mountains don't change and so much but this they thought they they finally said oh yes yes we diverted that a few years back so um you did your best now he's featuring um in this photo rosemary yes ormond and she is wearing one of the eastern costumes that he purchased when he did his tour of the levant well she's um she was very beautiful um the two girls were both ren and rosemary but um she was um she was um um obviously a wonderful personality um and um very selfless rather like her her aunt emily um thinking always more of other people than herself and she's really one of the presiding geniuses of the exhibition or the model because she appears numerous times and she was really his favorite alpine model and um it she's a very tragic story because um she was brought up by her french grandmother and um married a frenchman a brilliant medieval art historian uh called robert and de michel and he was killed they were married for less barely a year when he was killed on the western front and she then uh and i've got her letters to her brother the agony of his loss um and her tends to be brave and all of that and then she tended the blind blind soldiers at roye in a suburb of paris in a and then in 1918 she was in san jeve for a for a service and the one of the german shells struck it and about 80 people were killed including rosemary and they're buried in a lovely tomb um uh near where robert fell um outside soison it's a very moving monument and it's very well looked after by the uh the local commune but this i always think this sort of brilliant couple you know is one of the the things so um but she is uh absolutely and you she her sparkling personality comes across in all those lovely sumptuous pictures of her either in oriental costume or in those great big summer um rings and she you can feel her personality um and that incredible one where he's one one the cashmere shawl around her like a mummy you know i mean the shawls he could do a whole thing couldn't you on shawls and absolutely costumes here and sergeant is he's arbitrarily playing with it i mean he's creating these costumes you know um and this is um a larger group of the ormond children oh yes yeah that's all six of them the six nephews and nieces um and uh wren is on the left and um she's younger than rosemary yes she's younger wren uh and my cousin rose whose wren's daughter is in the audience tonight so um with her husband larry um so uh and her son ian and holly uh my father is the little boy in the foreground the two boys john louis who uh ran the swiss tobacco monsieur or they ran a tobacco company uh and geome who became organist at choreo cathedral in england very musical paul marguerite who was rarely uh rested development and was institutionalized and then rosemary on the right and here they are in this is the barnard dorothy barnard you probably some of you know carnation li li li li rose well dorothy was one of the little girls there and here she is uh and this is the watercolor called is it reading yeah reading um with rosemary sort of line line and um uh dorothy barnard and dorothy barnard i knew she was my brother's godmother as a very old woman still living in broadway where carnation li li li rose was painted this elderly lady um was still a sort of link right back to carnation li li li rose but it gives you a sense of how over decades these people continued to figure so pivotally yes and um mr barnard fredrich barnard was an illustrator famous for his dickens illustrations but he took to the bottle and sergeant sort of rarely kept i think felt a responsibility to mrs barnard alice barnard and they were always and a lot of these people were also part of his chelsea set you know they all lived in chelsea and so as it were they then moved out into the alps you know as a sort of on mass yeah and something that uh we we had a tour through the exhibition earlier today and someone asked about the patience of these friends and family who were models and erica responded saying that well at least they were allowed to lie down and read books so i think i think at breakfast you tried to avoid eye contact because otherwise you were in for a whole day of work sitting but it was worth it what it was worth it yes yeah so you mentioned rafaeli um on the left is a photograph of sergeant and rafaeli cleaning up a picnic in the alps and on the right one of the great watercolors in brooklyn's collections called in a hay loft uh in which sergeant has painted his two two of his italian plein air painter friends rafaeli and polonera and i just think it's an exquisite picture and it shows how close they were in their art and the days and days they spent together both working outside in oil in watercolor really relishing the setting and working in natural light it was what they sought yes i think it was a very close sort of and i think he you know the bearded figure like a sort of venerable sage i think he really liked him as a model because he appears in numerous pictures but this is i think it's absolutely wonderful because it's you know it's one of those interior scenes that sergeant handles with such sort of deafness so though it as always you don't you never sergeant loves to disorient you don't really know where you are where we are in space at all or where they are we had a very long discussion in conservation as to whose legs those are what's happening down at the bottom but it's we disagreed by the way we never decided whether you couldn't you couldn't you couldn't figure it out but it's there they are lying back on the hay and in this interior end of just the light just coming in isn't it just catching i mean i always think sergeant's really a master we talk about being a master of light but he's really a master of shadow yes i mean there's far more shadows in his picture than there are lights which is why of course when the lights do come on they're so vivid and absolutely and you said that you recently learned that he met raffaele earlier than you had expected letters these letters to this friend this friend of raffaele is it's quite clear that they met at port two in 1903 you know the sources too for this are very fragmentary i mean there are few sergeant letters there are reminiscences by various people there are a few third party letters so and sometimes there's quite a lot of correspondence jane de glen all her letters night but then she stops or she may not have stopped writing to her sisters but the archives of american arts don't have any letters after about 1907 so you get a very full and she's a very vivid letter writer and there's a one woman who may appear later eliza wood wedgwood who was always traveling with she wasn't an artist but she was a faithful companion and always sat she's always there sitting beside emily just sitting there being a sort of comforting presence but um she left a wonderful um diary and and reminiscence of her time with the sergeant so there are some but it's a bit scattered you know one year and sometimes for a bit more on some of the some of the the years you've got really all too little and there were relatively few letters in his possession when he did manning he kept nothing so there are masses of his letters hither and thither he was so fed up with having to answer and so he he hated all this correspondence and the first thing he did was to bin them all i'm sure um so anyway very frustrating very frustrating yeah very frustrating and of course no no records of his work no diaries no nothing of that kind so let's talk a little bit about your retracing of sergeant's travels and i think the alps are very fascinating in terms of um where he went where he first worked and then where he continued to work in the samplon and we have a few pictures here one is the hotel in pertu which was the the first location of choice yeah um from 1904 to eight i think is that around that yes and um you've visited the hotel is still there it's still there yes well when i first went there there was a huge building um and i there the the hotel and i thought oh goodness they've knocked down but no the gable when i really looked more closely they'd simply expanded the hotel and the central section was absolutely uh there intact so it is still the hotel where mr sergeant's uh stayed is still is still there and do you have any sense of why he first gravitated to this particular spot i don't i think probably somebody had said to him i think but i don't really know otherwise why he would have because pertu is quite off the map it's near kormayur but it's sort of up this valley and it's not somewhere that it wasn't like somewhere on the route sort of um fashionable um place yeah and i included this other photo because these were very very active people they they were out hiking and yeah this this all these images in the exhibition of these beautiful girls sort of lounging back or lying down in these oriental clothes or in those great things couldn't be further from the tree there they all are in hobnail boots out on the mountains mr sergeant is inventing so this is really what life was like in the portue or the sampland on vacation yeah uh and i did um i first went to the sampland but uh and it was i'm sure my father took us there in 1947 we went to switzerland um and through a war-torn france it was rarely dire and came to sw- and in england was in austerity we all had ration books and suddenly there in switzerland you would have everything you know it was like a land flowing with milk and honey but my father took us up for four days to the sampland where he had spent so many as a boy and i think that was a my first sort of um uh pursuit of sergeant if you like and we walked up to the calvasa glacia over all the streams that he had painted um and uh so it was a very memorable i've never forgotten it so to continue uh the karara pictures are one of the great feature of boston's holdings and he went in 1911 um well before this was a touristic stop and he really weathered the conditions there amazingly in order to paint well he lived in a hut in extremely primitive conditions um but he was all he didn't mind roughing i mean when he was out in palestine you know with the bedwin he was obviously camping and on horseback but he uh he didn't sort of physical uh rigors didn't or in the rockies i had to track him into twin falls and and um uh gosh that was a an epic of a walk and then um uh leiko hara and so he was physical and he there again he was camping out um he was uh a sort of um quite intrepid on um all that but i karara i have been to karara but of course i what i love to do you see really is to be absolutely and terry's done it as well you know to be in the spot where mr sergeant wasn't really identify you know where where you are and i of course sometimes i've skipped over walls where i shouldn't be you know and um cha cha in venice took us to uh who was our venetian waterman we spent a week identifying sergeants um venice watercolors and uh mr cha cha wonderful used to take us into places you wanted space to go at all you know in pursuit and um so we've we've had a few adventures um one way or another and was like the karara unfortunately you can't because they the quarry as they've been quarrelling for the last hundred years so the quarries don't look the same but they are marvelous abstract um and right in your that's really sergeant not letting you no relief he pushes your nose up against these great blocks and and these ant like figures and i should say these are sergeants photographs that we're looking at yes well yes i think these were we're never always quite sure because he was also with his manservant nicola uh who also took photographs and wilfred deglenn took photographs but a few of them survive through the deglenn connection um and uh uh so um here here is um a typical one with them shaping the blocks of marble uh and there are other some amazing ones and uh because these um these great blocks had to come down the mountain uh and it was a very hazardous profession these lisitori yes the quarry workers and then when you got them to the bottom you then had to shape them and all the rest of it and you had to let them down these huge ropes and of course if you you let two set pairs of ropes and if you let go you know you in dead trouble with what sort of you know your hundred ton block of marble coming down and by way of a slight advertisement for a lecture i'll be giving on may 4th if you can all come back and join us um i had the opportunity to trace through some of the italian villa gardens with my sister who's here tonight and it was remarkable not only to see what sergeant did paint but what he didn't paint and this is a set of views of the gardens at the villareale demalia outside of luca these grand axial designs including the pathway leading to the largest pool garden in italy and the beautiful assemblage of sculptures and the exedra behind it all lined with lemon trees and then one sees what sergeant chose to paint and that's the spot from which he painted it and he chooses to create this brilliant watercolor of the backside for better word lack of better word of these two river gods that are at the end of the pool garden and i think it's just so enlightening to do what you've done in terms of tracing pathways and encountering the places sergeant experienced to really understand what he chose to paint i i always wonder whether i'm the ghost looking at mr sergeant or mr sergeant is the ghost and i'm the you know because you you feel your eavesdropping on where he was um so it's sometimes rather eerie um that that experience but it is very um special when you suddenly identify something you know you come on something you've been searching for and then i remember going down in the val d'astre um and there's a famous picture of uh of the sort of mombra on my sieve and there was a particular sort of glacier and i couldn't see it and then suddenly the clouds parted as a certain point and i was just at the right angle because very often if you're not at the right angle you can miss things and there was the the picture and you just felt i you know i've got it but what he's i think also very interesting is i mean sergeant's a master of the fragment you know i mean you look at santa maria de la salute which is several pictures there which is one of the great churches at the beginning of the grand canal and um famous turner and all all the great painters are painted but does mr sergeant paint the dome and this great church no he hones in on this just this front entrance from the side chapel he doesn't show you the dome or anything and this is absolutely typical of him and if you go around venice of course he painted from a gondola everything is from the gondola and it's like a series of angles and odd perspectives um and i remember in sicily um at agregento um he painted some wonderful paintings of this rolling landscape going down to the sea and i suddenly sort of realized that if he'd moved his easel about two inches he would have got in the famous greek temples at agregento but i think he was absolutely deliberate because he wasn't interested in that he it was the flow of the landscape and this would have been a distraction you know it would he was not a painting views like santa maria de salute he's not painting um uh things as sort of icons he's he's particular things fascinate him i look at that great term wonderful great fountain you know the hercules in the gardens the villa medici the hercules is chopped off he doesn't the main point of this thing is the statue of hercules at the top it's just cropped out um and uh it wasn't what interesting it was the bowl the two great bowls and the interlinking part of the pedestal between with all those wonderful um and of course sergeant's always you you think there's an awful lot there you know we were looking at santa maria de salute and you think of the you know he's really just really got the figures and all the way when you come up close he's just a flick of paint i mean it's so uh it's a sort of illusion at how he that's much less and it's that's all part of the abbreviation and the abstraction and the modernism because i think they are intensely modern in that the way that he he flattens the space it's all about the paint it's about the material of paint how you handle paint and when you get up sometimes things seem to transmo transpose substances become quite else it's and it's almost it's a subject substance of paint quite as much as representation per se and that's what i think also is so so modern about him um and you feel his energy you know still don't they they these are scenes that absolutely that he's caught the moment and they're so um charged with his nervous energy i mean he's a difficult person to ever get in under the skin of because he's such a private reserved person but when it comes to his art you feel the energy and the passion and the all those emotions that he never displayed in life and his presence really all there you know and people used to say you know descriptions of him are of him at sort of white heat and it's the same with his when he's painting portraits demons demon he used to say as he rush back and forth and you can see in these pictures that i think he sort of um he knew what he wanted to do he in his mind once he got in his mind then he sets about it there's a wonderful essay in the catalogue which by the two conservators about the amazing range of techniques he's using and he's using whatever is to hand it's punching out he's using the back of the brush he's putting on um uh in pasto he's um uh i mean the number and nothing is quite what it seems and even some of the conservators don't really know sometimes what what mediums he's using but it's all whatever he got he got it in his head um it's painted you know al primo absolutely um and he's so so confident but he was he there's a wonderful description of him saying you know each watercolor is an emergency you know you you feel there's no comfort zone for him he he's each time he's chanceing his arm and the more complex the light effects the more complex the surfaces the more the more he seems to relish it there's no formula which is why it's all so live and well and to see so many and to have so many of them be different and distinctive well because he can do it can't he sometimes those very beautiful architectural studies so clear and lucid and beautifully done and then you get something like the gourds or the you know the all the mountains with just a whole lot of rocks thrown down and you'd think it's the most unpre-possessing subject but you know he doesn't it brings it to life and yeah yeah it's a tremendous range of subject matter and and techniques and he's doing whatever he feels is right for that for the substance for the moment yeah and it's all about arresting and that's what I think some of them you feel like the salute we did about a dozen pictures in oil and watercolour you feel there like a series of meditations of a series of of this thing seen under different conditions sometimes he's close up sometimes he's further away and you know working through a sort of succession of treatments of the same motif I think that's also very modern sort of approach so Richard can we take a few questions is that that would you be open to that of course great so does anyone have a question right here if you could stand up and you'll have to I will okay very good was money a problem for sergeant money yeah money always of course does matter but he made a lot of money as a portrait painter and as a mural painter but it is true that he gives up portrait painting in 1907 except for a few exceptions and it's clear that after 1907 he is marketing his oil paintings he's each year and increasingly from about 1910 onwards a series of pictures go to nerdler and nerdler handle them and they go to American collectors by enlarge and I think that's because of the loss of you know of of the portrait income he needs to supplement it and he's got his responsibilities for his sister and so I think that you know but he was he he and I don't think he always knew because he had very good advisors in particularly in America so that he probably worried sometimes more than he needed to but he was certainly you know very well off relatively speaking but I think that that and the fact that he I mean the watercolors he sold to Brooklyn I mean he was selling them for sort of 200 dollars a piece or whatever it was 241 there you are so so that did money did matter to him and he took on more mural commissions and he worked incredibly hard as a portraitist and I think that's part of what exhausted his connection to that and I think the thing is that you know the great thing about going to the Alps and all of that he didn't have patrons and were still their relatives leaning over his shoulder you know tutting or telling him what they wanted someone else yes right here sergeant's academic training well yes he did he studied with Carolus Dura a French portrait painter in fact if you go to the Met to that exhibition Impressionism and Fashion you'll see Carolus Dura absolutely terrific portrait of the fact the woman with the glove La femme au gant which is a sensational black portrait but the thing about Carolus Dura and where sergeant really learned his trade in a way that some somebody like Whistler you feel is much more struggles with great artists as he is struggles with the medium that Carolus Dura taught his pupils from the very beginning instead of just doing that thing you know you must draw from the cast and then you can draw from life and only after you've been through that discipline you actually learned a paintbrush Carolus Dura taught his people right from the start to paint and to paint values that was the great word the difference of lights and darks and that each stroke of the brush must define a value and it was that technical expertise that Carolus Dura passed on but sergeant also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts at the rigorous drawing regime so he Johnny will knew his drawing and in a sense the the murals which are very ambitious compositions very academic go right back to that training in the École but Carolus Dura was the one who really gave him that skill with the brush which of course in the oil painting and also in watercolor because sometimes you feel he's painting watercolors almost as an oil painter you know it's the same isn't it sort of instinctive yeah and a couple of the pairs up in the galleries you can see that one or two right here I wish I knew the answer because you sometimes feel why did he pick up the oil paint that day or rather than the watercolor I think he always I think and particularly later when he was selling things through Nerdler he knew he'd got to come back with some pictures that were saleable I mean that were good enough in his view to sell an exhibit and so I think but of course with watercolor you've much greater freedom you can I mean an oil painting is a much more of a commitment so I think he probably I don't know I sort of feel he may have rationed himself a bit you know that I can't just paint watercolors because I've got to you know produce summer corpus of I've got to come back with some oil paintings so I think there must have been some in his mind and of course the oil paintings some of them may have been finished in the studio we don't know rather like Raphael you see him there he's painting actually in the studio from all sorts of oil sketches but why he preference one over another it's a very good question and women in white maybe just a brief comment about sergeants Orientalism Orientalism yes well I think it's sort of make-believe because you're not under any illusion that there are oriental models that are clearly European models and that's in an alpine setting by alpine brooks so he's but he he did love fantasy I mean his one favorite book was the Arabian Nights the 101 Nights I mean that was the absolute and who's the Vartek Beckford William Beckford famous late 18th century Oriental fantasy and he loved flow bears salambo so he loved there is that fantasy element which I think is deeply attractive to sergeant but I don't think he's not really like true orientalist painters who paint harems and shakes and slave markets and all that stuff I mean this he's playing with it costume and but he loves to wrap these models these sensuous models in in these extraordinary cashmere shawls that he wraps around them and and it's as much about the shawls and again flattening the space and yes they're delicious pictures and and of course they're deliciously painted and the colors are so gorgeous yeah I mean they're just and you get up the impasto is so you know wonderful isn't it when sergeants really going one more I think right here madam X do you just want to say a word about sergeants feelings about the madam X portrait oh I think he knew it was his one of his great pictures and as soon as madam Gautra had died Edward Robinson who was the director at the Met put in a bid for it and I think sergeant that really appealed to him that it would come to the Metropolitan Museum and and I think he knew it was one of his and he put an enormous amount of effort into it I mean he it was painted at his request this extraordinary woman with her white skin and that's sort of incredible profile and I think he spent more time on it and it was you know a very considered masterpiece which is why it was such a shock to him you know when it was lambasted at the and in looking at it today why how could people have of I mean it's a sort of icon of high style and she's but it somehow got under everyone's net you know and it was mocked as being a sort of decadent decadent thing and and the fact that she's sort of so not a kind of conventional role model for women is it she's sexy and she couldn't give a damn I mean she's that bravado and provocativeness and of course off the shoulder and all of that and it really did because he planned it as being his real knockout blow at the salon this was really going to put him in the big time and the fact that it was you know and that's when he comes really to England but with his tail between his legs and it's a few talks of giving up art after Madame Gautreau I mean he's so depressed so it was a real disaster for him but of course it's one of the great pictures it's fantastic so I want to urge all of you to pick up the palm card outside we have a wonderful sergeant course that will include lectures by Erica Hirschler, Trevor Fairbrother, our conservator Tony Owen and myself and with that I want to thank you Richard for sharing so much