El Jaleo
John Singer Sargent , 1882
232 × 348 cm
Oil on canvas
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston
El Jaleo is an oil on canvas painting by John Singer Sargent in 1882 . It has a height of 232 cm and a width of 348 cm. The picture shows a flamenco dancer in front of a group of musicians dancing a jaleo . Sargent had visited Spain a few years before the picture was taken and observed Spanish dancers as well as studying Spanish painting. The picture shows a relationship to paintings by Diego Velázquez , especially in its choice of colors and the treatment of light and shadow . Sargent exhibited the picture in the Salon de Paris in 1882, where it received positive reviews. The picture belongs to the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston .
Image description
At 232 cm high and 348 cm wide, El Jaleo is one of Sargent's largest paintings. A dancer can be seen in the foreground, behind whom several people are sitting in a row against a wall. The dancer is shown in a side view to the right of the center of the picture, with her back pointing to the left edge of the picture. She has leaned her upper body slightly back and extends her left arm up to the right edge of the picture. On the left hand, the little finger and index finger are stretched out, while the other fingers seem to grasp something - apparently a castanet . The right arm is supported on the hip and turned a little forward. With her right hand she holds the fabric of the white skirt and pulls it up a little. The fabric of the skirt with its lush folds only gives an idea of the contours of the lower body. A high-heeled shoe peeks out from under the skirt. Green-black fabric covers the upper body and leaves the arms largely unclothed. The frayed ends of the fabric are swirled slightly upwards in the back. Under the outstretched arm, a large piece of fabric with fringes blows forward almost horizontally. With the position of the arms, the body leaning backwards and the material blowing forward, the dancer gives the impression of movement. Her head with the pinned up black hair is lowered slightly forward. Her eyes seem closed as well as her mouth. This lends itself to associations of concentration or trance .
The people sitting on the wall behind the dancer accompany the dancer. On the left, cropped from the edge of the picture, sits a man with a musical instrument on his lap. Next to him, another man has raised his arms to clap his hands. Then there is an empty white chair with an orange on it. Two men are still sitting in the row playing the guitar and a man with his head cocked and his mouth wide open - he seems to be singing. Three other people are sitting on the right edge of the picture. Two women have taken their places next to another man clapping his hands. One of them also claps her hands and the other woman, sitting on the right edge of the picture, has one arm stretched upwards. The men wear black suits and white shirts. Except for the man who has tilted his head back, all men wear a black hat. The women on the right edge of the picture are dressed in white like the dancer. Their upper bodies are covered with red fabric with numerous fringes hanging down. The people behind the dancer are not spectators of the dancer. By playing the musical instruments, clapping their hands and singing, they are part of the performance, they give the dancer the rhythm.
The space in which the scenery takes place cannot be precisely defined. Only one wall is visible. Two guitars hang from this above the musicians. The wall plaster varies from gray to sand colors. There are a few reddish spots on it. A red handprint can be seen above the empty chair. The floor consists of wooden planks. The lighting of the room is also unclear. A light source shines on the people from the front so that the silhouettes of the bodies and hats of the seated people can be seen on the wall. The shadow of the dancer can be seen on the wall as a dark gray surface, whereby the exact contours are missing here. Her blurry shadow underlines the indicated movements of the dancer. In the area of the floor, only the first rows of planks are illuminated. The rear floorboards are in the dark and provide a strong contrast to the brightly lit white skirt of the dancer. The sparse use of color in the picture is striking. While large parts of the picture are painted in black, white as well as brown and gray tones, only a few color accents in red, orange and green loosen up the picture. At the top right is Sargent's signature and the year 1882.
To the creation of the picture
John Singer Sargent was an American painter who lived mostly in Europe. From Paris he made an extensive trip to Spain in 1879. First he stayed for a month in Madrid, where he visited, among other things, the Museo del Prado . Here he made numerous copies of paintings, including one of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas . In El Jaleo there are various parallels to Las Meninas . Velázquez's picture also shows a room with several people. As with Sargent's picture, the choice of colors is largely limited to black, white, and brown and gray tones, and there are only a few spots where small color accents are set with red. The lighting is also similar in both paintings. In Velázquez's picture, large parts of the picture are in the shadow area and the central figure, the Infanta Margarita, is illuminated from the front by a light source.
From Madrid, Sargent traveled on to Ronda , Granada and Seville . In Andalusia he saw flamenco performances - El Jaleo is a form of flamenco - and made various sketches. The painting, however, was made after his return to Paris. The monumental painting was not a commissioned work, but intended for exhibition at the annual Salon de Paris from the start . The Spanish topic was quite helpful. Since the Second Empire there was a real Spanish fashion in Paris and the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet, performed in Paris in 1875, followed on from this. In this piece, set in Spain, the title role of Carmen is a "gypsy" who, among other things, dances and sings. When the 26-year-old Sargent presented his painting in the salon in 1882, it was called El Jaleo, Danse des gitanes . The addition Danse des gitanes ( Dance of the Gypsies ) is clearly an allusion to Bizet's Carmen . After the exhibition, Sargent received mostly positive reviews for his picture. Paul-Armand Silvestre highlighted the parallels to Spanish painting in the magazine La Vie Moderne . The picture reminded him of Velázquez when he looked at the dancer and of Francisco de Goya when he looked at the people in the background.
Provenance
After the picture was shown in the Salon de Paris in 1882, it was acquired by the Boston collector Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Jr. (1863-1912). Isabella Stewart Gardner , also a Boston collector, was a relative of Coolidge. At the latest when he had exhibited the picture publicly in Boston in 1888, she showed interest in the picture. Coolidge donated the painting to Gardner in 1914 for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum named after her .
See also
literature
- Mary Crawford: John Singer Sargent's El Jaleo . National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 1992, ISBN 0-89468-169-9 .
- Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .