Study of Sargent's Lady With a Rose

This was a color study of an oil painting by John Singer Sargent: Luise Burckhardt 1882. I've looked at this actual painting many times, as it hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York. My focus in this attempt was to capture the beautiful dance of color and tonal variation in the blacks of the dress, the cloth that hangs as the background and the deep shadow where there's no discerning line between it and the dress. In scrutinizing Sargent's method for painting the black silk dress, I learned that the lighter areas have blue/turquoise in them. When this sits directly beside the darkest areas of black, the illusion of silk satin is created. There were also tiny areas of the dress that are thin and gauze-like, so wonderful to paint in watercolor.

To me, one of Sargent's hallmark techniques is melding parts of the figure seamlessly into the background, and here that happens at the bottom right where the black of the dress transitions into the darkest teal/blue of the shadow in the background. It is by copying paintings by the masters and studying areas of things that seem like "nothing" on the surface (the face is what we tend to look at first, especially in a portrait), that I learn to bring beauty into painting something like a rotting banana. 

Size: 9"x12"

2025-06-N

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