Sargent's Repainting

I remember reading that John Singer Sargent would often require many sittings to get his portraits right, and that he was rarely satisfied with his first efforts.

But I always wondered: Did he scrape off each false start and then begin all over again? Or did he just work over the previous start after it had dried? How did he know when a painting was going wrong?

Thanks to two of his former pupils, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley, we have an idea of his methods:


"He drew a full, large brush down the whole contour of a cheek (over one of her half-finished studies), obliterating apparently all the modeling underneath, but it was always further to simplify that he took these really dreadful risks, smiling at my ill concealed perturbation and quite sympathizing with it.

"The second painting taught me that the whole values of a portrait depends upon its first painting, and that no tinkering can ever rectify an initial failure. Provided every stage is correct, a painter of Mr. Sargent's caliber could paint for a week on one head and never retrace his steps -- but he never attempted to correct one. He held that it was as impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong, as for a sculptor to remodel the features of a head that has not been understood in the mass. That is why Mr. Sargent often repainted the head a dozen times, he told me that he had done no less than sixteen of Mrs. Hammersley.

“When he was dissatisfied he never hesitated to destroy what he had done. He spent three weeks, for instance, painting Lady D' Abernon in a white dress. One morning, after a few minutes of what was to be the final setting, he suddenly set to work to scrape out what he had painted. The present portrait in a black dress (above), was done in three sittings.

“He did the same with the portrait of Mrs. Wedgwood, and many others. Miss Eliza Wedgwood relates that in 1896 he consented, at the insistence of Alfred Parsons, to paint her mother. She sat for him twelve times, but after the twelfth sitting he said she would both be the better for a rest.

“He then wrote to Miss Wedgwood that he was humiliated by his failure to catch the variable and fleeting charm of her mother's personality -- that looked like the end of the portrait. Some weeks later he saw Mrs. Wedgwood at Broadway, and struck with a new aspect he said:

‘If you will come up next week we will finish that portrait.’

“She came to Tite Street, a new canvas was produced, and in six sittings he completed the picture which was shown at the Memorial Exhibition.

“I have also seen the assertion that he painted a head always in one sitting. He painted a head always in one process, but that could be carried over several sittings. He never attempted to repaint one eye or to raise or lower it, for he held that the construction of a head prepared the place for the eye, and if it was wrongly placed, the understructure was wrong, and he ruthlessly scraped and repainted the head from the beginning. That is one reason why his brushwork looks so fluent and easy; he took more trouble to keep the unworried look of a fresh sketch than many a painter puts upon his whole canvas.

“The purpose of all this reworking was to: develop (in Sargent's words) ‘an appetite to attack the problem afresh at every sitting, each attempt resulting in a more complete visualization in the mind. The process is repeated until the canvas is completed.’”

Thanks, Walt Morton!

Across the Border

The border guard asked who we were, what we were doing, and what we brought back. We told him we were painters up to see an exhibition called "Garden of Enchantment," and all we bought were a couple of art books. He looked kind of disgusted with us, and waved us through.

At the PriceChopper in Plattsburgh we got some turkey sandwiches. I saw a guy two aisles over in the checkout line who looked just like one of Henry Hudson's crew in Rip Van Winkle. I started sketching him, and when he noticed, I just told him: "I'm sketching your picture."

Later I caught up with him at the Lotto machine and showed him the sketch. His shoulders were covered with sawdust. He told me he is a logger, and we got talking about the early chainsaws that the old-timers used to work. They used motorcycle engines and took two men to operate.

He said the oldest trees he had seen in the forest were yellow birch. Once in a while he runs across a chestnut or an elm, but he said he leaves them for wildlife. He invited us by his place, but we had to get home.

Drawn Together

"We are like children," said illustrator Aleksi Briclot (second from left). "Give us a pencil and some paper and we are happy and quiet." Center is J-S. Rossbach, Gilles Francescano and J-B. Monge.

Mr. Briclot and Jean-Sebastien Rossbach, who collaborated on the fully illustrated Merlin, were drawing sketches as a team, one of them beginning the sketch and the other finishing it.

It was a great honor to meet artists like Leo, J.B. Monge (above, with me on his shoulder holding his pencil), Erlé Ferronnière, Didier Graffet, Manchu, Enki Bilal, and many others.


I am touched also to meet students (such as Dmitri, above) and teachers from the art school Pivaut.


The people from the city of Nantes were very gracious and generous to Jeanette and me. Thank you to Marie Masson who arranged the festival, to Patrick Gyger who put together the the Dinotopia exhibition, to Mr. Paul Billaudeau and Mr. Jean-Marc Ayrault for helping welcome Utopiales to the Cité Internationale des Congrès of Nantes, and to Madame Agnès Marcetteau of the Musée Jules Verne.

Harvard Wind

Sometimes I like to exaggerate a little when I'm out sketching to poke some fun at my fellow man (and at myself in the process).

The Eye: Simplicity and Softness

The nice thing about working very quickly is that it forces you to make decisions favoring big truths. I painted this portrait during a 20 minute sketch group session.

Because I was moving fast, I didn’t have time to see too much detail in the eye and the eyebrow. Simplicity and softness is the secret to eyes anyway even if you have a lot of time to work on them.

There's a a tiny bit of finger-blending at the outside corner of the eye and just below the lower lid. I don't like to put my fingers into the paint, but in a quick-painting session, I don't always have time to reach for the right brush.

The eyebrow is modeled in just two planes. It all looks fairly “strokey” close up, but when you back up from the 9x12 inch painting, the detail appears to be all there.

Stoddartsville Sketch

We're staying for a couple of days in Stoddartsville, Pennsylvania. Our little cabin is right next to the Lehigh River, where we've been painting and rafting every day. Yesterday we met 91-year-old John Butler, who presides over a whole settlement of historic buildings.


On his front porch during a summer shower he told of his 25 years in the Navy and his hunting adventures in Alaska.

One of his fondest memories was driving a dogsled down the frozen Matanuska river by the light of the moon.

Egyptian Mummy Portraits

Long before realistic portrait painting developed in Europe in the Renaissance, Roman-Egyptian artists did striking likenesses in wax on limewood. These Fayum funeral portraits date from around 100 years A.D. According to the Metropolitan Museum:

The finely executed portrait depicts a youth with large, deep-set eyes and a down-turned mouth. His downy moustache indicates that he is no older than his early twenties. A number of mummy portraits represent youths with their first facial hair, a feature that had particular connotations in the Greek-educated society of Roman Egypt. The incipient moustache was both an indicator of the young man's entrance into important social groups and a signal that he was at the prime of sexual attractiveness and vigor.

Flickr source, link.

My Mac Lazarus

A few years ago my G3 Macintosh computer decided to crash. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to start up. I lugged it into the car and brought it to Jerry, a computer repair man.

"Lazarus and I are going to have a little chat," Jerry said. He took the covers off everything and hooked up a tangle of wires.

"Will it ever work again,?" I asked nervously. "Hummmm, oh yeah," Jerry said.

I thought of all the letters I had written and all the photos I had taken. Down the drain. Stupidly, I hadn't backed up in a long time. Jerry mumbled a few incantations and fell into a deep reverie.

Then for the next two hours, as he contemplated the carcass of Lazarus, I did what I always do when I'm deathly anxious: I sketched.

Eventually my computer came back from the grave. It made some nice noises and some lights came on. Narrow escape this time, I told myself.

Portraits at the Fair

In-Flight Portrait

During the long flight from London to Cleveland yesterday, I drew a pencil portrait of a gentleman across the aisle.

He wasn’t aware I was sketching him. I observed him with occasional and sidelong glances. I didn’t want him to be self-conscious because his face would change. When I was finished, I showed it to him and he signed it. I did most of the sketch in HB and 4B graphite pencils, with the aid of a stomp and a kneaded eraser. (Click on the image below for a big enlargement)


My drawing shows him tapping the video screen to select a movie. He watched a film about young love. As I was drawing, I was thinking about identity and aging.

In the foundation of our hearts, none of us sees ourselves as old. Mentally we are all teenagers—teenagers who happen to be trapped in increasingly unreliable bodies.
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This picture appears in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

Sal Westrich

Art students at Pratt Institute in New York will know Sal Westrich. He teaches history there during the school year and then spends the summers in southern France, enjoying the delights of tomates à la Provençale and salade niçoise. What could be a better life?

Two Things to Remember

Before his students graduate from the Hartford Art School, instructor Dennis Nolan sits each one of them down and gives them his intense wild-man look.

“You can forget everything else I taught you,” he tells them. “But I want you to remember just two things: how to place the horizon line, and how to draw an ear.”

Mr. Nolan told me that it’s rare to find a well-drawn ear these days, even among professional artists. “Most people forget to show the leg of the helix descending into the conchal fossa,” he said. “And not many artists know about Darwin’s tuber.”

Uh-oh, I thought to myself. I’m supposed to be a professional artist, but I’m not sure what he’s talking about.

So tonight after the workday is done I’m going to sit down and figure out the artistic anatomy of the ear. I’ll show you the results and we'll compare notes tomorrow.
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GJ post on the horizon line or eye level, part 1, part 2, and part 3.
GJ post on the Hartford Art School.

Irish Music Party

Here's yesterday's sketchbook page, with quick portraits from Irish accordion player John Whelan's 50th birthday party last night. Along the top are drawings of the Half Moon, the Clearwater, and the Onrust, flagships of the Henry Hudson Quadricentennial celebrations. We watched them from the shores of the Hudson River as they sailed by.

More about the Quadricentennial, link.

Abe in Two

Dan’s Squeezebox

My son Dan plays Irish accordion. Which is funny, because Jeanette and I aren’t Irish, and we’re not musicians either.

Dan figured out how to play the squeezebox on his own, starting when we gave him a toy accordion at age four. He played it and played it until it broke. He listened over and over to a CD called “The Big Squeeze” while reading Hardy Boys books.

So we did what every sensible parent should do…we kept him up late in pubs.

At age seven he got to meet some Irish squeezebox heroes—Father Charlie Coen, Billy McComiskey, and John Whelan. They became musical mentors and set him on the right path. He bought a real accordion with his lawn mowing money. I did this life portrait of him when he was 11. Since then he won the North American Irish accordion championship six times.

Now he’s twice that age, 22 years old. Yesterday he graduated from Harvard College with a concentration in music.

The commencement ceremony was full of pomp and pageantry. It was funny to see all the alumni, with their bow ties and panama hats.

What’s next for Dan? Well, he collects accordion jokes. One of his favorites is: “What’s the definition of an optimist?” “An accordion player with a business card.”

This summer he will travel throughout Europe as a writer-reporter for the Let’s Go travel guide book company. He did this the previous two summers in Thailand and Greece.

For the remainder of 2009-2010 he’ll be on a fellowship in Ireland, where he’ll learn more about the music tradition from the legendary players there. He is grateful to the Shaw and Payne Foundations for providing the fellowship opportunities.

Within the last month he has played for the president of Ireland and for the passersby on the sidewalks of Cambridge (for which he needed a busker’s license.) Congratulations, Dan, and may you always bring the gift of music to confirm the joys and to lighten the sorrows of all sorts of people.
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Dan's new travel blog "Have Accordion Will Travel" link.
Dan's website: dangurney.net.
Hear him playing at his MySpace music page.
His band is called "The Hay Brigade," and they were interviewed on PRI's The World.
Listen to the Hay Brigade at their MySpace page.
Read his amazing travel blog posts about the Monk from Sukhothai. and The Hotel of the One-Eyed Cats

Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers is the former president of Harvard University and Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton. He is currently the Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama.


I sketched him yesterday in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. If you’re wondering why I’m here in Massachusetts, stay tuned until tomorrow…I’ll explain.

This is a tiny Woodnotes pocket sketchbook, only 3.5 x 4.5 inches, with a Derwent Inktense watercolor pencil and a fountain pen, softened up with a water brush.
Above, photo by Kerry Anne Bradford
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Wiki on Summers, link.

Remembering a Face

One time a few years ago Jeanette and I encountered a crazy guy on the street. He started yelling at us out of the blue. When we returned home an hour or two later, a little shaken, we set the challenge of drawing him from memory.


Jeanette’s drawing is on the left, and mine on the right. We both got the beady eyes, the broad nose, the brow ridge, the spiked hair, the lines around the mouth, and the stubble. Our recollections varied in the head shape, the mouth, and the ears.

I don’t know if the cops could identify the guy based on our memory sketches.

This exercise gave me even more appreciation for Mort Drucker, the master of drawing faces from memory. If the legends is true, he did many of the MAD magazine movie satires from his recollection after simply watching the movie once through.
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Mort Drucker image from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" courtesy Mike Lynch’s blog:

Lines and Colors post on Drucker:

GurneyJourney Memory Series
Part 1: Art and Memory
Part 2: Memory Game
Part 3: Remembering a Face

Jury Duty

Yesterday I was called for jury duty in Poughkeepsie, New York.


I arrived at the Dutchess County courthouse and sat in a big waiting room with a lot of other prospective jurors. We filled out our forms, watched the big TV on the wall, and waited. After two hours, the Commissioner of Jurors, Hooker Heaton, told us that there was no need for us after all. We were relieved of duty.

I was glad to return home to work, but I was also a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping to get a seat on the jury so I could play at being a sketch artist.

A few years ago, Jeanette got the call. She made it all the way to jury selection. She did a sketch of Mr. Vasti, the plaintiff’s attorney in a civil case.

Watching Television

People hold still when they’re watching television, and that’s a big help to the portrait sketcher.


A few days ago in Pittsburgh I had lunch at a restaurant with some friends. There was a TV set hanging from the ceiling near our table. A golf program captivated my friend’s son. He gazed upward with an angelic look and didn’t move until his hamburger came.

In 2003 my son sat like a statue at a diner while waiting for his scrambled eggs.

Next time you find yourself in a waiting room or a sports bar, pick the seat near the TV looking back at the watchers. You’ll have your choice of models. If they glance at you, just smile and say “I’m sketching your picture,” and they’ll go back to watching.

Sympathy and Range

Technical matters aside, a measure of the greatness of a painter of people is the ability to convey humanity in all its forms.

In this painting of the interior of a tavern, Norwegian-Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer (1851-1909) portrays a couple of groups of hard-working men, probably fishermen from the village of Skagen.


Krøyer brings his compassionate focus to a man who sits alone with his pipe and his bottle of drink. The man has a ruddy face, a heavy brow, a bent ear, a protruding lower lip, and a broken nose.

From the same hand comes this painting of the Benzon daughters of 1897. They are the essence of freshness and innocence, smiling shyly, bathed in the warmth of summer light and air.

This sympathy for the full range of the human condition is as welcome in a painter as it is in a great writer, like Dickens or Shakespeare.
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Wikipedia on Kroyer: link.
Tavern painting is in the Philadelphia Museum.
Earlier GJ post about Kroyer's "Hip, Hip, Hurra!", link.