Early Influences and Artistic Growth

Emily Sargent was born in January 1857 in Rome, the middle of three surviving children (two siblings had died in early childhood). She was almost exactly one year younger than her brother, the artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Closeness in age and a peripatetic way of life meant that they were very much thrown together as children and they remained close throughout their lives. Their much younger sister, Violet, was born in 1870. Emily’s parents, Dr Fitzwilliam Sargent and his wife, Mary Newbold (née Singer), were originally from Philadelphia. They travelled to Europe for what was intended to be a temporary stay; it became a permanent expatriate cosmopolitan lifestyle. As the family moved from one city and resort to another, the children absorbed European culture and were encouraged to sketch and paint (Mrs Sargent was herself an accomplished watercolourist), recording the continent’s celebrated sites and treasures. As Sargent’s talents became apparent, his artistic career was given serious attention. He was sent on sketching tours and given instruction at the Academy in Florence before embarking on a formal programme of study in Paris. Emily’s life was circumscribed by an accident when she was four which left her with a deformed spine and she remained very much at home with her parents and sister. She did receive some training in London from Julius Rolshoven and Charles Wellington Furse in the 1890s but there was never any suggestion of her having a career in art. When Dr Sargent died in 1889, Emily’s role was established as companion to her mother – a fate familiar to unmarried daughters at the time. They set up home in Chelsea, close to Sargent, but travel was in the family’s genes and they journeyed independently, moving around extensively and adventurously in southern Europe, the Near East and North Africa, a nomadic way of life which offered her a rich and constantly changing source of subject matter.

Life as an Artist

A number of Emily’s watercolour sketches date from before the turn of the century, but surviving works suggest an increase in intensity and purpose from the early 1900s. It cannot be a coincidence that this was the time that Sargent was beginning to devote himself more seriously to watercolour as an escape from the pressures of portrait painting, developing sophisticated techniques and submitting his works in watercolour for public exhibitions. Emily sketched in Southern Spain, Tangier, Palestine and Egypt in 1900-01, painting distinctive architectural studies, street scenes, gardens and landscapes, all suffused with Mediterranean light. A timeline of travels is patchy, but Emily was in Spain in 1902 and 1903, and in Tunis in 1903, probably staying with her sister Violet and her husband Francis Ormond (he had a house in Tunis and another in the coastal resort of Hammamet - Emily would continue to paint in Tunisia into the 1930s). She was in Spain and the Holy Land in 1904, Venice in 1905, again in 1906 and in a number of subsequent years. She was in the Simplon with Sargent in 1910 and 1911 painting striking mountainscapes and at San Vigilio on Lake Garda in 1913.

After her mother’s death in 1906, Emily often accompanied Sargent on his painting expeditions in Europe. The pattern was for them to spend the summer months in the coolness of the Alps, meeting up with Violet and her family and a floating population of friends and fellow artists. They would then typically move down to Venice for a period before venturing further into southern Europe, one year it would be Rome (1907) and the surrounding area, another year Majorca (1908), or Corfu (1909), Florence and the villas and gardens around Lucca (1910), Granada, Spain (1912).

Sargent represented Emily sketching en plein air in several of his watercolours. See, for example, In the Generalife (1912, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and an affectionately witty image of her dressed in voluminous black with a paintbrush held between her teeth (Tate, London). She always featured prominently in Sargent’s plans. He wrote about finding a painting location, ‘a moderately high place for next summer, not too high for Emily & paintable enough for me’. It is clear from similarities of subject that Emily and Sargent painted together, sometimes alongside each other. There are technical and stylistic affinities between their work, notably in the broadness of the washes and the use of opaque pigment to create highlights and texture. A few of Emily’s watercolours bear the initials ‘E.S. & J.S.S.’ and there are other occasional jottings suggesting Sargent’s hand in a composition, his advising his sister in practical and technical terms as well as offering encouragement and support. Emily drew the outlines of her composition lightly in spare strokes of pencil, before laying on loose washes with freedom and confidence.

Emily’s work was rarely seen in public. She exhibited a single work ‘Sunrise at Thebes’ at the New English Art Club in London in 1891 and four copies after the Old Masters (Rubens, Gentile Bellini, Pordenone and Lorenzetti) in the Spring Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1908. These copies attest to Emily’s commitment to learning from Renaissance artists on her visits to Venice (two of the works copied were in the Accademia) and in Antwerp and Assisi, confirming that hers was not a dilettante artistic spirit.

Later Years

After their brother’s death in 1925, Emily and Violet committed themselves to the preservation and promotion of his artistic legacy. They were involved in his studio sale and the memorial exhibitions in London, New York and Boston and they donated his work to institutions in the UK and the USA with great magnanimity and dedication. During the remaining decade of her life Emily continued to travel and to paint. She was involved in an accident with a cyclist in Zurich and died on the 22 May 1936. She is buried beside her brother and sister in the cemetery at Brookwood, Surrey. Although unassuming and diffident, she was woman of real sympathy and generosity with a gift for friendship, and she was very much valued in her own circle. The development of her talent was constrained by her gender, by the lack of opportunity available to women at the time and by attendant social conventions and expectations. She played a supporting role in art and in life, but her reputation is just beginning to emerge from Sargent’s shadow and her artistic ambition and scope being given appropriate recognition.

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