During Sergeant’s long career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, wandering from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.
Each destination obtainable pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure time, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night.
His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially remarkable, many done from the perspective of a gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely stunning and as one reviewer noted, everything is given with the intensity of a dream.
In the Middle East and North Africa Sergeant painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fisherman. In the last decade of his life, he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.
With his watercolors, Sergeant was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes.
And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sergeant painting most only for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains.
In watercolors, he playfully portrayed his friends and family dressed in Orient list costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions.
His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Car fax Gallery in London in 1905.[68] In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Evan Charters wrote in 1927.
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