Two Sailors Furling Sail

Curator: John Singer Sargent created this pencil sketch, entitled "Two Sailors Furling Sail," around 1875. Editor: The energy in this drawing is fantastic; it’s so raw. The texture of the sail is incredibly well rendered using just pencil. Curator: Absolutely. Sketches like this offer a glimpse into Sargent’s process. It's a departure from the highly finished society portraits he’s best known for, but this drawing arguably reveals more about the realities of labour at sea. There’s a certain romance that inevitably gets attached to maritime paintings but Sargent, I think, subverts it here. Editor: It really pulls apart that idealized image. You can see the material weight of the canvas in the density of the pencil strokes, the labor it would require. It makes me consider the socio-economic backdrop and how work on boats, ships, and waterways enabled mobility for working people who did not always have other employment options, such as those tied to the feudal-like farming systems still in effect in much of Europe during the mid-nineteenth century. Curator: Right, and it's important to remember how images like these would circulate—as sketches reproduced in print, or informing larger, more public-facing paintings that helped to shape public perception about the lives of sailors. This drawing would appeal to growing, more urban art-buying crowds. There's a level of authentic representation people were starting to desire in artwork. Editor: And that’s fascinating! That Sargent's sketches of working people at labor would go on to influence those bigger pieces, making these working practices not just inspirational but also economically relevant. This sketch seems incredibly utilitarian too – to work out an image before rendering it more substantially with paint. The means of production is built into its execution. Curator: Well, seeing this has been interesting. It underlines how closely art making is entwined with class structures and wider social trends, not least how society chooses to portray those it employs and depends on. Editor: And for me, it reinforces the idea that to understand art, we really need to understand its production – how materiality and labor connect within a society.