For someone who by his own admission, "Can't paint worth toffee!" Richard Ormond is certainly a mover and a shaker in the world of fine arts. The former curator for England's National Portrait Gallery, Ormond currently serves as the director for the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, a $20 million complex that incorporates the Royal Observatory and the Queen's House. While managing the world's largest maritime museum with a staff of 400 against a background of diminishing funding, Ormond has also found time to pursue his favorite "lost cause"— John Singer Sargent. With co-author Elaine Kilmurray, Ormond recently published the first volume of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raissone, aptly titled John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits. This enormous work which documents an oeuvre consisting of three mural cycles, over 600 portraits and 1,700 subject pictures and landscapes, inspired The National Gallery of Art's current exhibition of over 100 John Singer Sargent paintings.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC is featuring this special Sargent exhibition through May 31, 1999. Over 100 paintings and watercolors, representing the artist's most significant and beautiful works, arrived from London's Tate Gallery, which housed the exhibit through January 1999. It is the first time since the retrospective mounted after Sargent's death that so many of his works have been shown together. With input from the Tate Gallery and assistance from Boston curators, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray are the original scholars for this much celebrated project.

Ormond and Kilmurray's work on the Sargent Catalogue ideally suited them to be the "directing spirits" behind the exhibition. However, Ormond admits that, "You have to be a lunatic to do this type of work—tracking down paintings, documenting his letters, establishing a full history so you can distinguish between works that are fully genuine as opposed to those masquerading as Sargent's. The Catalogue is the culmination of 20 to 30 years of work. I inherited this project in the 1970s from David McKibbin, then head of the art department at the Boston Athenaeum, who had been researching Sargent since 1947, but had never settled into the task of cataloguing."

As John Singer Sargent's great nephew, it seems Ormond was predestined for this "lunacy." Ormond recalls, "Grandmother, Sargent's sister, was very much a going and formidable presence in our young lives at age nine or ten. . .My father and uncles had, as young boys, been in Switzerland with Sargent,
so I heard many stories of my great uncle in the days of his Richard Ormond speaks with John Howard Sanden at the 1998 Portrait Arts Festival prime. . .1 was always aware of this great inheritance." After graduating from Oxford in 1962, Ormond took a job at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Birmingham. In 1964, the curator encouraged Ormond to use his knowledge of John Singer Sargent and establish a special exhibition. Ormond discovered that, "Once I started working on the exhibit, the family history and the art interest went hand in hand."

Family history, however, was not the only thing that motivated Ormond to devote so much of his energy to Sargent. It seems that Sargent also aroused Ormond's rebellious nature: "Oxford is the home of lost causes and Sargent certainly was a lost cause. I wanted to be a crusader against popular opinion. In the early 1960s I was fighting for Victorian and Edwardian art. The Modernists were teaching us that art is about significant form and Victorian art was considered a ghastly sentimental period. We have come a long way since then. Birmingham was a great depository of Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art, which included works by Sargent. The critics used to say about Sargent, 'Oh yes, that slick superficial portrait painter.' I wanted to reverse these mistaken judgments. It is a vindication of what I started so many years ago with Sargent on the map now. It makes me feel like justice has been done."

So why is John Singer Sargent worthy of Ormond's passionate 30-year labor of love? "First let's just say he is a great artist," asserts Ormond. "The personalities he paints live on the canvas in an extraordinary way. Sargent was a master with the brush and he designed pictures that live in the imagination and memory." Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, of American parents. He studied in Italy, France and Germany, receiving his formal education at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in the Paris studio of the noted French portraitist Carolus-Duran. Sargent spent most of his adult life in England, maintaining a studio there for more than 30 years and visiting America only in short trips. "He is both American and European," Ormond continued. "That's what gives him his power. He's an observer and an outsider. Of course the values of his parents were stamped on him, their New England ethic, the work ethic, Puritan if you will. But he never really lived in America, even though he visited in his late teens and twenties. Of course he never quit being a part of English an French society. Sargent was his own man, difficult to pin down. He was an international figure, a cosmopolitan and international figure."

For all Sargent aficionados, the National Gallery exhibit features the main phases of Sargent's art. According to Ormond "We wanted to show all the phases of Sargent. . .and get away from the idea that he was primarily a portrait painter that did a few landscapes. He was all three: a muralist, a landscape artist and a portrait painter. Within that, we tried to go for the absolute peaks, the absolute star works. We wanted to show Sargent in top gear." On view at the exhibit are Sargent's portrait, landscape, and figure sketches, 1874-1884; exhibited portraits and subject pictures, 1878-1884; impressionism, 1883-1889; commissioned portraits, 1890-1917; landscapes and figure sketches, 1900-1914; and watercolors, 1880-1925. For those less familiar with Sargent, the exhibit boasts some of the artist's most noted works such as Madame X and The Boit Children.

Ormond thinks people are surprised by the sheer range and variety of work presented at the exhibition, and he has a difficult time choosing a favorite work from the 100 paintings. "I like different things from different periods. Perhaps I favor some of the early Venetian things—those mysterious, dark-skinned working women. I have a special yen for them. They are very stylish and mysterious in this wonderful space with the light of the Grand Canal at the back. It's the half-light, the shadows of Venice. It's not the picture postcard view that most artists present. I also love the Boit Children and Carnation, everybody loves those. And some of the late work with his painting companions. You can feel a character and relationship between the people."

Criticized for what some believed to be a superficial brilliance, Sargent's portraits fell into disfavor after his death. But thanks to crusaders such as Richard Ormond, those same canvases are now acknowledged for their naturalism and superb technical skill. For Ormond, the most important thing to remember when visiting the exhibition is to "drop your prejudices and look at what Sargent painted. Enjoy the painting without getting caught up in theoretical and social prejudices. Avoid the odious comparisons to other artists. To hell with Picasso! Admire Sargent for what he did paint, don't berate him for what he did not paint."

As Richard Ormond sits in his office overlooking the Royal Observatory, Queen's Home, and the great blocks of the old Greenwich Hospital, fretting over the upcoming Millennium activities and the opening of 12 new galleries, he often wonders if his Sargent work is "killing me or keeping me going." But in times of solace he recognizes that, "With the relentless demands of leadership, Sargent is a terrific outlet. It is an antidote that keeps the other side of you alive outside of the museum."

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Jennifer Hebblethwaite is the literary manager for the Horizon Theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and a freelance writer and dramaturg.