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Paint with John Singer Sargent's colors!
This handmade watercolor set includes 16 pigments that were in John Sargent's watercolor palette in early 1900s.
Each one is half-pan size.
-- Alizarin Red Lake
-- Burnt Sienna
-- Cassel Earth
-- Chrome Yellow Light
-- Cobalt Blue
-- Emerald Green
-- English Red
-- Gamboge
-- Lamp Black
-- Lemon Yellow
-- Rose Madder
-- Rouge Vermillion
-- Titanium White
-- Ultramarine Blue
-- Vermillion
-- Viridian
John Sargent (1856-1925) was a cosmopolitan (North American-European) artist who was well known on both sides of the Atlantic for his oil paintings. Sargent was trained to paint like the grand old masters and was friends with French post-impressionists who embraced bright pure colors and outdoor (plein air) painting. Sargent made much money painting rich people's portraits and traveled extensively. He always brought his watercolors and painted everywhere he went.
My favorite anecdote about Sargent's watercolor painting is about the time when he traveled with his friends and the group was delayed at a rural train station. They were standing on a platform when they saw a cow roaming in a nearby field. The train was due to arrive in about half an hour and Sargent unpacked his watercolor paints and easel and went into the field to paint the cow. This shows how passionate he was about painting and how eager he was to look for interesting subjects and capture them in his artworks.
Sargent painted over 2000 watercolors in his lifetime! Unlike his oil paintings, dark and grand, Sargent's watercolors are transparent, light, and almost abstract. Sargent used watercolors to quickly capture scenes and to convey light. Watercolors allowed Sargent more creative freedom than his commissioned oil works and became his medium for artistic exploration and experiments.
In his early years, Sargent used watercolors as travel sketching medium and was not as serious about them as he was about oil. In 1909 he exhibited his watercolor art for the first time in the Brooklyn Museum (New York) and it was a huge success. The museum purchased all 83 watecolor paintings from that exhibition (many of them are still part of the permanent collection). His next watercolor exhibition was in 1912, at the Knoedler Gallery (New York) and majority of the artworks were purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After that, Sargent became known as a master watercolorist, in addition to his fame as an oil portrait artist.
Personal painting experience: Reading about and researching Sargent's artworks and paint palettes (both oil and watercolor), I began to appreciate his approach to blending and applying colors. Sargent's watercolor palette is mostly cool with a few strong warm colors. It is quite versatile and its colors can be recognized in all of his watercolor paintings: landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes painted all over the world. The palette is quite refined, i.e. there are no redundant colors. Each color is clean and bright. I am a big admirer of practical limited palettes and this is a good example of one. I like Sargent's use of opaque white: he used it to cover mistakes and to add or re-establish highlights that he painted over :-)
All colors in this palette are lightfast, highly pigmented, saturated, deep, and rich. Each one is a stand alone pigment (no blends!).
