[Thomas Nash]

When ones paints broadly as Sargent did, there is a magic that occurs as you work from large masses and large color statements to smaller touches and lighter and darker values. You leave smaller shapes by default, shapes that you never actually drew. Colors and values that at the beginning may look too dark or too light, hopefully turn out to be just right.

There are many illusions to deal with. Sargent didn't start with his darks and approximate the entire look and then polish it up. His technique was quite different. It would be solid, but really not quite "sing" until he put on the final decisions. They either worked or they didn't.

Assumptions (or guesses) have to be made in the early stages as to what the paint you initially apply will look like when later pieces of the puzzle are added. Experience helps one to make better early judgments.

Sargent is famous for his cursing at the canvas, his frustration about the "demons". I am quite certain that he was not upset because he had "messed up" and just applied a stroke sloppily or in the wrong place. I believe he was disappointed because he had just come to realize that something he had earlier assumed to be true turned out not to be.

That is why he sometimes was able to scrape down and paint the head successfully in a relatively short time. Once he solved the puzzle or "saw through the illusions" as I often say, it was just so much brush work and we know he had no problem with that. He contended that one could paint a head in one session if only they could concentrate thoroughly enough. (I'm paraphrasing). I think he means that if one could "figure it out" correctly, painting it was not that big a deal. (maybe not for him!!)

I will quibble a bit with an attitude I often hear, suggesting that he was interested in facile brushwork for it's own sake in order to "make it look like he did it easily and quickly". This sounds somewhat pejorative as if implying that he was trying to deceive us or make himself look more gifted than he was. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here.

I think we all recognize the superiority of an image that is painted with authority rather than the use of halting, fumbling brush strokes. Robert Henri spoke more eloquently than I can on this subject in "The Art Spirit".

So when Sargent scraped down to start fresh it was not that he wanted someone to think that he did not struggle, but rather he knew that the resultant painting would be more effective, satisfying and beautiful to look at. He knew that the extra effort required to do it right "from the ground up" would make for a better picture.

His "style" was to make his work as good as he knew how. I don't think he felt that going back into the details of a broadly painted picture and doing some remedial fiddling made it as good as it could be, so he backed it up or scarped down to at least the point that he felt it went off the tracks.

Anyway, that's my take on it!