‘Sargent and the Sea’ opens at Corcoran

Eighty-four years after his death, John Singer Sargent’s reputation as the premier portrait painter of the Gilded Age is undiminished. The striking plein-air seascapes he made as a young man remain less familiar.

It’s these seminal works that the Corcoran Gallery of Art is showcasing in “Sargent and the Sea.” The museum’s own celebrated Sargent seascape, “En Route pour la peche (Setting Out to Fish),” serves as a kind of anchor to the show and will be familiar to regular visitors. But there are nearly 80 other pieces — beach scenes, marine paintings and remarkable freehand marine drawings — to discover, all made before Sargent had hit 24.

There’s also a small oil sketch from the summer of 1877 in Cancale, a fishing village on the northwestern coast of France revered then and now for its oysters. Far from the most visually arresting piece on view, the sketch is nevertheless, for curator Sarah Cash, the show’s most satisfying get.

It turns out that “Setting Out to Fish” and the other well-known marine Sargent of this era, “Fishing for Oysters at Cancale,” share a common ancestor in this sketch, one that Cash and Richard Ormond — author of the four-volume (so far) Sargent raisonne and the artist’s grand-nephew — had been seeking for years. While other drafts show Sargent working out figures or other elements that appear in “Setting Out to Fish” and “Cancale,” only this sketch shows us the full compositional scheme of the completed masterworks.

Sargent scholars knew the sketch from its appearance in a black-and-white photo from 1941. Since then, it had seemingly vanished. Cash and Ormond had exhausted all avenues trying to locate it, even examining the wills of its known prior owners.

“I kind of thought that because it’s the size of a sheet of computer paper, it might have been thrown out in a file folder or something and been lost forever,” Cash says.

But this spring, Cash received a call from a colleague at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (the permanent home of “Fishing for Oysters at Cancale”), who in turn had been contacted by an appraiser trying to asses the value of a small oil inscribed, “To my friend Beckwith, John S. Sargent.” The painting in question had the same dimensions as the one Cash had been hunting. A sticker on the back of the work indicated it had once been lent to the Boston Museum.

Traveling to meet the sketch’s owners, who have elected to remain anonymous, Cash was able to confirm it as the sketch she and Ormond had sought, and to arrange for it to be lent for its first public showing in more than 70 years. (“Sargent and the Sea” will travel to Houston and London in 2010.)

“It’s very exciting to have it almost fall out of the sky in just enough time to be included,” Cash says. “If it had surfaced just a bit later, we wouldn’t have been able to make the arrangements to include it or to reproduce it [in the exhibition catalog].”

The object of all this hot scholarly pursuit turned out to be a cherished family heirloom.

“They said, ‘We don’t know what you mean the painting’s been lost. We’ve known where it was the whole time,’ ” Cash said.

In addition to Sargent’s early seascapes, visitors who catch the show at the Corcoran will have the opportunity to take in some of those stately portraits for which the artist remains famous. Two of the artist’s most celebrated, full-length likenesses, 1879’s “Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Edouard Pailleron)” and 1883’s “Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Mrs. Henry White),” will be on view, along with a choice Sargent landscape, 1911’s “Simpleton Pass.”