When Mr. John Collier was writing his book on The Art of Portrait Painting, he asked John Singer Sargent for an account of his methods. Sargent replied:
As to describing my procedure, I find the greatest difficulty in making it clear to pupils, even with the palette and brushes in hand and with the model before me; to serve it up in the abstract seems to me hopeless.
With the assistance, however, of two of his former pupils, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley, it is possible to obtain some idea of his methods. When he first undertook to criticize Miss Heyneman's work he insisted that she should draw from models and not from friends. If you paint your friends, they and you are chiefly con-cerned about the likeness.
Having scraped the palette clean he put out enough paint so it seemed for a dozen pictures. Painting is quite hard enough without adding to your difficulties by keeping your tools in bad condition. You want good thick brushes that will hold the paint and that will resist in a sense the stroke on the canvas. He then with a bit of charcoal placed the head with no more than a few careful lines over which he passed a rag, so that is was a perfectly clean grayish colored canvas (which he preferred), faintly showing where the lines had been.
Then he began to paint. At the start he used sparingly a little turpentine to rub in ageneral tone over the background and to outline the head (the real outline where the light and shadow meet, not the place where the head meets the background), to indicate the mass of the hair and the tone of the dress. The features were not even suggested.
This was a matter of a few moments. For the rest heused his color without a medium of any kind, neither oil, turpentine or any other mixture. The thicker you paint, the more color flows. He had put in this general outline very rapidly, hardly more than smudges, but from the moment that he began really to paint, he worked with a kind of concentrated deliberation, a slow haste so to speak, holding his brush poised in the air for an instant and then putting it just where and how he intended it to fall. To watch the head develop from the start was like the sudden lifting of a blind in a dark room. Every stage was a revelation.
For one thing he often moved his easel next to the sitter so that when he walked back from it he saw the canvas and the original in the same light, at the same distance, at the same angle of vision. He aimed at once for the true general tone of the background, of the hair, and for the transition tone between the two. He showed me how the light flowed over the surface of the cheek into the background itself.