Infinite Art Tournament Penultimate Match: van Gogh v. Sargent

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Vincent van Gogh and John Singer Sargent were both painters, were roughly the same age, and have two more things in common: they are both resented by Jan Vermeer, whose two losses came at their hands, and they both resent provisional champion Pete Brughel the Elder, who handed each of them their single defeats.

This is the 1089th match of the Infinite Art Tournament, and also the second-to-last.  The winner clinches the silver and earns a rematch against Provisional Pieter for one last shot at the GOAT!!!

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Vincent van Gogh
1853 - 1890
Dutch; worked in France

Over the course of his decade-long career (1880–90), he produced nearly 900 paintings and more than 1,100 works on paper. Ironically, in 1890, he modestly assessed his artistic legacy as of “very secondary” importance.... By the outbreak of World War I, with the discovery of his genius by the Fauves and German Expressionists, Vincent van Gogh had already come to be regarded as a vanguard figure in the history of modern art.

- The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

• Beat up on Hugo van der Goes in Round 1.
• Got past Natalia Gontcharova in Round 2.
• Gave El Greco a real drubbing in Round 3.
• Lambasted Giotto in a Round 4 13-1 blowout.
• Beat Atkinson Grimshaw in Round 5.
• Beat Thomas Eakins in a spirited Round 6 match.
• Beat Remedios Varo by a wide margin, but with a lot of torn voters, in their Round 7 match.
• Lost to Brughel in Round 8. 
• Beat Vermeer easily in Left Bracket Round 8. 
• Beat Caillebotte in Round 8 Elimination. 

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John Singer Sargent

1856 - 1925
American

Although Sargent painted, showed, and won praise for both portraits and subject pictures at the Salons between 1877 and 1882, commissions for portraits increasingly demanded his attention and defined his reputation. Sargent’s best-known portrait, Madame X, which he undertook without a commission, enlisted a palette and brushwork derived from Velázquez; a profile view that recalls Titian; and an unmodulated treatment of the face and figure inspired by the style of Édouard Manet and Japanese prints. The picture’s novelty and quality notwithstanding, it was a succès de scandale in the 1884 Salon, provoking criticism for Sargent’s indifference to conventions of pose, modeling, and treatment of space, even twenty years after Manet’s pioneering efforts.

- The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

• Beat Juan Sánchez Cotán easily despite crowd support in Round 1.
• Skunked Roelandt Savery in Round 2.
• Skunked Dutch still-life master Rachel Ruysch in Round 3.
• Crushed Henri Rousseau in Round 4 by a two-vote swing.
• Encountered some resistance, but prevailed, against Rembrandt in Round 5.
• Scorched Charles Sheeler in Round 6.
• Beat Vermeer in Round 7. 
• Beat Leonardo da Vinci in Round 8. 
• Lost to Brughel in Round 9.

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