As a bird artist, I like to see other artist’s renditions of avian life…
While researching a little about Sargent’s Madame X, I came across hundreds of his speedy drawings. It seems that Sargent was constantly creating images (how did he have the stamina?) Among them, many many sketches of birds including a vulture, peacocks, swans, turkeys, seagulls. Here’s some of my favorites from his bird drawings — all images from the Metropolitan Museum in New York:
I was especially intrigued by this small oil sketch of a dead bird, because it shows the artist’s inventiveness in propping it up so as show its wings, and perhaps record important details and forms if ever needed to make the appearance of a live bird:
That’s a very strange little painting!
I don’t know if Sargent used bird imagery in any of his more formal paintings, except for this one — which is really his use of a bird already depicted in a vase that is included in the composition; a savvy picture-within-the-picture composition (click on the image to get the larger version, and you’ll see the bird in flight in the middle of the vase):
Daughters of Edward Darly Boit, 1882 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
There was a lot of use of wing imagery in the Boston murals that he did http://www.alisalibby.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/sargent-mural.jpg and I believe a lot of the studies, as many of his studies in general were, in prepation for these murals (at the Boston Public Library and at the Museum of Fine Arts). http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=30504&int_modo=1
Thanks! I look forward to checking into it!