John Singer Sargent's "Spanish Dancer"

A leading portrait painter of his era, John Singer Sargent has created numerous portraitures throughout his career. One of Sargents more well know portraits, entitled the Spanish Dancer (c 1879-1882) is indicative of Sargent’s earlier work. Unfortunately, Sargent fails to match the artistic skill and prowess of his predecessors, as indicated by the poor use of modeling techniques and motivated lighting developed by the highly skilled portrait painters before his time.

While Sargent maintains an interesting color palate and framing approach in Spanish Dancer, he fails to create visually interesting surroundings in which the subject of the portrait exists. While succeeding at creating minimalist surroundings to draw ones attention to the main subject of the painting, Sargent fails to create motivation for his lighting/modeling, and also fails to maintain basic principles of consistent directionality. With Sargent’s failure to motivate lighting, there is no visual payoff in the artist’s choice to highlight the dancer’s de-saturated dress above her face. There is also no motivation for the back wall to be not only the same brightness level as the dancer’s fleshtone, but the same tone as well.

While Sargent attempted to create a dramatic portrait using high contrast lighting and deep tonality within a monochrome color palate, he fails at creating motivation for shading and tonality, thus alienating the viewer by providing no guidance as to the center-point of the portrait. Instead, he inexplicably places attention upon the subject’s textureless dress, and neglects both the subject’s facial expressions and body movement. Sargent creates an uninteresting image in Spanish Dancer through his failure to motivate lighting and modeling.