# 6 John Singer Sargent - " A Bedouin Arab "

I love the painting but hate the title.  Why?....because it feels to me (and others are free to dissent)that by naming this handsome man by his ethnicity is inherently racist when compared to Singer Sargent's practice of naming the Caucasian pillars of society he painted surrounded by all the familiar trappings of that achieved by upper echelons.

The key question is - why this man didn't deserve to be named?  To have produced the clarity and sheer animus in that expression, Singer Sargent must gazed long and hard upon this face, the detail the observations, but...to have intimately scanned every inch of this face and not know the name of the sitter....that is bewildering.   Not to have conversed even through an interpreter....

The face is of a strong proud defiant man, full of spirit and intensity behind the eyes.  I imagine this individual as capable of testing the will of another with his silence, with his gaze.   The style of the painting too is mixed.  The contrast of the treatment of the headress, is of the impressionistic style, carved out in a few simple but earthy strokes.  Vague but dramatic none the less.  It conveys all the elements necessary to tell the viewer that this is the dramaturgical apparel of the Arab man, why give the dress any more complex a treatment as perhaps the Caucasian eye has enough information it needs to recognise a stereotype it is so wedded to.

Perhaps I am wrong.  An opposing view might be that the detail of the Individual's face is a test to us to look deeper, and the juxtaposition of the simple garment painted in an impressionistic style is a device that gives the viewer a road map to stare at this individual and see him as unique.  The transition and merging of stlyles was the next line in a shift from Singer's other works.  These follow the watercolour series he created in Venice.  Is this Singer Sargent's way of showing that his own views were adapting and evolving through art.   Certainly his journey to the Middle East did not have a primary purpose of documenting the tribal Bedouin.  Instead it was to visit predominantly Christian historic sites for inspiration to create a mural.  Instead he  became seduced by the Middle East and along that path at one point he was guided and befriended by the legendary "Queen of the Desert" Gertrude Bell.

However I view the painting, my mind keeps on crawling back to the title and debates whether it is truly racist or whether there's a deeper Irony that fails to attach to my thinking.