Damp squib

Sargent and the Sea
Royal Academy, until 26 September

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) is an artist whose name arouses hopes of dazzling technical virtuosity even when his subjects are fairly run-of-the-mill. Famed as a portrait painter, his art (at its finest) has great glamour and stylishness, backed up by exuberant brushwork which can be truly exhilarating. So a summer-themed exhibition of Sargent and the Sea sounds a treat for all: seductive at the very least, and possibly rising to great heights, with all the explosive splendour of Franz Hals crossed with the Impressionists. Sadly, there is little of such pyrotechnics visible in the Academy’s damp squib of a show.

The first impression in the Sackler Galleries is not good: besides a very thin hang of pictures, the exhibition has been overdesigned. The wall colours, for one thing. I had a girlfriend many years ago who insisted that blue and brown did not go together. She was speaking sartorially, but in laying down her law she seemed conveniently to ignore the beauty of a newly ploughed field against a clear sky. I always remember this, probably because I was guilty of wearing blue with brown, and partly because I thought her wrong. When I discovered in more recent years that the artist John Armstrong made a thing of wearing blue and brown together, I at once warmed to him, though this was not the main reason for writing a book about him (published last year by Philip Wilson at £35). Nevertheless, you may imagine that I am predisposed towards the blue/brown combination; not, however, in their current manifestation at the Sackler Galleries.

Deep chocolate mud and pale blue make a curiously cold and somehow callous combination, but they do serve to distract the viewer from the meagre harvest of pictures on the walls, and perhaps that was the intention.