John Singer Sargent
This is a painting of Sargent's two nieces, Rose-Marie and Reine Ormond, during their trip to the French Alps in 1912, when they all were staying in the village of Abriès. The two girls are perched on the side of an eddy from the cold snow-melt of a mountain stream. They sit crouched, partly on rocks, in the quiet contemplation of fishing. The pose is as organic as any family trip. In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which made brilliant references to Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless facility for paraphrasing the masters in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity and earned Sargent the moniker, "the Van Dyck of our times.". Still, during his life his work engendered negative responses from some of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer," and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry." By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe.
Tomorrow is Mother's Day - I want to dedicate today's piece to the loving memory of my mother. She would love it.