Sargent and the Sea

The title promises a blast of salty sea air but this small show begins stodgily enough, with maps and dates pinpointing exactly where in the world the peripatetic John Singer Sargent chose to alight when not transatlantic hopping from London or Paris to New York. It's enough to know that Sargent was well travelled, sketching sailboats, sea dogs and squid as he went and that he was clearly at ease on the open waves. His 1876 commute lasted a gruelling 17 days and was documented in 'Atlantic Storm', the most striking picture here, depicting a ship's stern pitching into a terrifying wall of swell, a few brave figures clinging to the steeply inclined deck.His other marine paintings lack the same drama, conversely, amounting to a perfect storm of tedium.

Sargent, was of course, the society portraitist du jour and was far too busy flattering presidents, lords and ladies, or causing scandal among the Salon gossipers with his delightfully sexy portrayal of 'Madame X', to spend much time contemplating the infinity of oceans. Instead, he worked on a chocolate-box ready scene of peasant oyster gatherers in Breton as well as other saccharine seaside japes and cherubic bathing boys. His scrapbook reveals that Sargent's sketches of sailors at work or in repose could have amounted to a grand composition on seafaring, but no such picture was forthcoming. Which makes you wonder why this marginal moment in Sargent's early career is worth magnifying, when at best it's a footnote to his successes elsewhere.

There is a superb little study of Whitby Bay, in the calligraphic style of that other expat anglophile American, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, but Sargent failed to make a fist of his canalside views of Venice - surely a benchmark for any self-respecting, water-loving artist. It's only when Sargent's all at sea (the catalogue makes the same transitional point that his true calling as an artist hadn't yet surfaced) that he really takes the plunge by painting pictures of nothing but open water - without shore or land in sight. These three truly radical oceanside viewpoints, only anchored by a bobbing boat or two, were literally and figuratively thin on the ground but too few and far between to make this voyage worthwhile.