Arts and Letters

The death of John Sargent was sensational. The Keystone cannot drop out of the great triumphal Arch of the Graphic Arts, but an important member of that segment which comprised the portrait painters had fallen, and we could scarcely realize that no more contributions would come from him to our contemporaneous exhibitions. The thought created a sort of void, a depression in our outlook, for the impress of the man had been emphatic, his influence had been pervasive.

Already some writers are paying the tribute to him which consists in trying to explain that he was not really as great as we thought him, that his qualities were beginning towards the end of his life to pass in favor of new adventure in Art. I am firm in the belief that his niche is permanent and in the topmost row, and that the qualities inherent in him were of the kind that will not pass with any new adventure of the future.

What were those qualities? Perhaps in a very summary way his superiority may be established upon five fundamentals: his capacity, instinct even, for characterization, his sense of values, his dazzling technique, his style, his originality, or if you prefer, his unusualness, his difference from other men.

To me nothing in his performance was more assuring than his almost miraculous sense of values in nature; values—the things that give roundness, depth, and existence to objects.

Sargent was sometimes a little indifferent to color,—it was not what compelled him most, temperamentally, though superb color passages are often to be found in his work,—but he never slighted the values. As for his technique, it was based on knowledge first and therefore was sound, quite sound, yet was in manipulation akin to sleight of hand, to wizardry—the kind of handling before which each of us says, "How under the sun did he do it?"

I appeal for confirmation to our fellow-member Professor John C. Van Dyke in memory of the two occasions when as we stood together before the Wertheimer portraits in the National Gallery of London, we felt that there were canvases in the room painted by other artists, but that Sargent's people were alive. As for his originality, one may cite almost any of his works—the difficulty would be to find one of them that lacked it. Notable examples are his furniture tobogganing down from a very high point of sight in his portraits; his amazing rendering of protective coloration in the picture called The Hermit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; his little girls lighting the lanterns; his Ellen Terry holding the diadem of Lady Macbeth above her head; his Prophets; his Confusion of Religions; indeed practically all his canvases in the Boston Public Library.

He painted portraits, decorations, genre, landscape, in oil, water color, pastel, black and white and was a leader in all. Probably he will live longest as a portrait painter, but some of his really magical passages occur in small water colors, apparently just records done for fun, while his mural paintings, all unusual, are sometimes unforgettable.

Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. I met him there for the first time one day in 1871 on the Carraja Bridge. He was with his mother, whom I remember better than the boy himself. Of him I have but the faintest memory of a slender American-looking lad—how I should have looked at him if any hint of his future could have been conveyed by his appearance and had opened a vista.

Five years or so later, we men of the Montmartre group of Art students in Paris were stirred by rumors which blew across the Seine from the Rive Gauche, tales of a pupil of Carolus, so clever that all his comrades envied him and that the master, very proud of him, was perhaps a bit envious too.

Carolus was given a big oval ceiling to paint in one of the galleries of the Louvre, his pupils worked with him, and portraits of two or three Americans including one of Sargent himself, appear among the figures in the decoration and in passages look more like the latter's work than like that of Duran.

The pupil's portrait of his master next took us all by storm, and then his full length of Madame X, a well-known American-Parisian beauty, set Paris to talking and made the painter and the lady famous in a day. Again, as was the case later with many of his works, it was one of those productions which look as if they had been brushed in in a few moments by a Goya or a Hals, leaping into creation almost as the photograph follows the flashlight—yet which in reality were the fruit of sustained observation and repeated experiment. It was just the painting of a profile, much powdered, outlined rather crisply and of a white evening gown with a train—an impression you would say, swiftly seized and recorded—then let alone. But Sargent showed me in a portfolio a number, many indeed, of the profiles done in pencil or color; each differing from the other very slightly but very subtly. Here was no impressionist satisfied with his throw and not risking disturbance by second thought, but a man steadying himself by second reference, correcting his impression and extracting the essence.

And then while society was saying in Paris, "What a future this young portrait painter has here," Sargent crossed the channel. Perhaps the young painter was wiser than the conversational badauds who wondered why he deserted them. Of course his early portraits were reminiscent of his master, but Sargent was to better his instructions, that was patent already to those who saw far, and it is possible that the situation may have bred sensitiveness in Carolus. If it did and if Sargent perceived it, and we may well believe that little escaped his astounding perceptiveness, the pupil was too chivalrous ever to be anything but generous in his appreciation of the man who taught him, or at least laid the foundations of the younger artist's brush-work and draftsmanship. At all events there he was, a foreign-born New Englander with a Philadelphian admixture, with the souvenirs of his first youth spent in the Italian Athens under the influence of the most elegant and subtilized art produced since that of the Greeks, with a French technical training to back and complete his natural advantages, and now arrived in a country where from the walls of public buildings and private houses, Reynolds and Gainsborough, Raeburn and Lawrence, Hoppner and Romney could speak to him of the special branch of Art which was to be the main basis of his career. He so used his gifts and opportunity that in a short time he was a popular, perhaps the popular portrait painter with an ever growing clientele recruited from those at once who wished and those who deserved such immortality as the brush can confer. The remark has been made that after all, Sargent was an impressionist with a natural feeling for characterization and an extraordinary facility in handling his medium. He was all that, but that he was only that is an untenable proposition. The picture bought by the Chantrey Fund for the Nation and representing two little girls in a garden, lighting Japanese lanterns tied to flower stems, is a good example in point.

It was painted in 1887 in Broadway, Worcestershire. I had the good fortune to see the execution of it from start to finish and it showed one interesting and indicative side of its author's methods. Each evening at twenty-five minutes to seven, Sargent dropped his tennis racquet and lugged his big canvas from the studio into the garden. Until just seven, that is to say while the effect of light lasted, he painted away like mad, then carried the thing back, stood it against the studio wall and we spectators admired. Each morning, when after breakfast we went into the studio, we found the canvas scraped down to the quick. This happened for many days, then the picture, daughter of repeated observation and reflection, suddenly came to stay.

Now the comment adduced above might be true, that this was an impression set down in twenty-five minutes in its essentials, but it was the sum of a dozen times twenty-five minutes of impression, with hours for reflection left between each one of those periods and its successor. The picture became thereby the result of a developed thought, emended, pruned, corrected. Sargent undoubtedly did not say with Goethe, "Stand, ye are perfect," for he was not poetizing, but he paused for the same reason, namely that his creation had reached the point which he felt able to attain. His swiftness was a precipitation of thought, not merely a habit or inclination or instinct.

And I am reminded of a story about him, true or untrue. When still quite a young man, in France or England, he was walking in the country by the side of a stream. A fisherman, an 'Arry or a Gugusse, called him opprobrious names, possibly as a relief from boredom or vexation owing to the unsuccessfulness of his catch; he did catch something eventually. Sargent continued his walk for a time without turning his head—disappeared even, but reappeared, handled the fisherman in such a way that the latter remembered the incident, after which, he—Sargent—resumed his promenade. The reflection, swiftness, and thoroughness of the artist's methods and technique may all be seen in the story.

Said my master, Léon Bonnât, to me, one day, "Pour faire vraiment bien, il faut faire tout du premier coup,” and added after a few seconds of reflection, "et encore on ne peut rien faire du premier coup." Sargent showed by the manner of his attack that he agreed with the first half of Bonnât’s dictum—and the cracking and color-changing on some of his canvases where overpainting had occurred, proved the truth of the latter half of the French painter's insistence. And yet and yet—some of Sargent's water colors, some surfaces where the painter could not fumble without our detection, seem almost to demonstrate that he could achieve the impossible and finish "du premier coup."

“Are you a man or a meeracle," said the soldier to Kipling's Mulvaney when the latter rode the mad elephant. "Betwixt and bechune" said Mulvaney, and so Sargent in some of his water colors approaches the miraculous. One has seen notices of more recent water colors by other men, calling them finer than Sargent’s because “more direct.” That is because their authors had stopped short on the road, which he continued upon. Stopping is the beginner’s refuge, and is backed by the answer heard in every art school to the question, "Why did you not go further?" ''Because I was afraid I should lose what I had already." Now assuredly nobody knew better than Sargent that over-elaboration kills the vital look of a work, but Sargent could go further than most people before over-elboration was encountered, and one likes to feel with him and with Robert Browning, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp."

Although portrait painting occupied most of Sargent’s time, some of his close friends declare that his love for mural painting was great, early felt, and persistent. It has been maintained that he did not feel the fundamental architectural requirements in mural painting. One is inclined to reply that Sargent instinctively rebelled against convention (above almost anything he disliked the banal, I once heard him imply as much), and although architectural requirement is something bigger than conventions it does include some of the latter. The greatest mural painters in the greatest period of mural painting and in the country where it reached its highest point, namely in Italy, and, say, for a period covering much of the 14th and 16th centuries and all of the 15th, grew up in mutual practice with the architect, often indeed were architects themselves, and they understood that desirability of thrust and counterthrust which may be suggested and felt even in painted lines and masses.

Raphael in such works as the Disputa and the Theologia, both in the Vatican Stanze, probably carried composition to the ultimate as related to the shapes of the spaces given him to decorate.

In a way he settled and prescribed the general ordering of a decorated lunette or medallion—but even as early as the day of Giotto, there was much understanding of the filling of geometrical spaces by more or less flat painted forms.

Sargent once said in speaking of mural painting, "I understand Giotto and I understand Paolo Veronese better than I do the intermediate work." But by that he undoubtedly meant that the flat unmodeled treatment adhered to by the earlier artist and the frankly pictorial decorations of the Venetian were in either case legitimate and, in a way, settled procedure—while the intermediate work whether reactionary or progressive was hampered by side issues of anatomy, perspective, chiaroscuro, and much besides.

Beyond question Sargent was conversant with all this, and if he did not always use the knowledge we may believe that it was because he thought of producing a striking and unusual effect, of being original and himself, before he thought of obeying an architectonic requirement. That in the cycle of Boston decorations there are more or less unrelated parts is undeniable, the horizontality of the frieze of Prophets does not melt into the "Confusion of Religions" above as it might and perhaps architectonically should. But what unusualness, how it all catches your surprised attention; where among the so-called Old Masters do we find finer presentation of the Prophets than in the figures which our artist has marshalled along one end of the hall in the Boston Library? They are not as tremendous as Michael Angelo's seated figures of the Sistine vaulting, not so traditionally "Biblical" looking to us as some of Dürer's Apostles. Sargent's creations seem to derive rather from a mixed souvenir of Syrians or Fellaheen, muffled against the sun of the desert, or of those monastic-looking, heavily-hooded figures that support certain medieval Burgundian Sarcophagi in European museums; but at least this painted threnody of wild, arm-tossing creatures is a new presence in mural art of the last three hundred years, the product of a mind with a quite outstanding visualization. At the other end of the Gallery the artist, years later, filled the lunette with his "Trinity" in solemn, balanced, ordered opposition to the "Confusion." Again it seems a little unrelated to the rest, does not entirely flow into the sequence—although one must admit that in this case the want of relation is not more marked than in hundreds of examples of ancient masters.

And what interest is in the relief work modeled we are told by the artist's own hands! What a puzzling, suggestive mélange of hints that refer one's remembrance to the tangle of beasts and people and ornament, on the lintel of Moissac for instance, or other kindred Romanesque churches of southern France; or again to a Spanish souvenir, as if Our Lady in the Archivolt had journeyed thither from some altar of Santiago da Compostela. And the row of Angels with the instruments of the Passion,—the make of them, their facture, is so interesting; they are washed in, one might almost say swashed in, as with a broom; there are two of them almost entirely of a first rubbing of Indian red with a few touches of the blue and liberal touches of gold; again there are nearly blue angels with just a little of red and gold. And their type is beautiful, they are all alike, androgynous looking, as angels should be, one would say, and suggesting in their faces both classical antiquity and good fifteenth century panels.

In the lunettes of the side walls, the compositions are extraordinarily daring and personal, especially in the one where the young Christ triumphantly advancing towards the spectator is apparently mounting an incline in a manner that seems almost a preparation for an Ascension. The color in all of the side lunettes is very simple in scheme, being hardly more than blue and a sort of golden cream color, the design is intricate and full of style, rhythm and decorative quality.

In the cycle of the Museum of Fine Arts at the Fenway, the treatment is quite different. The power and solemnity of the Library figures reinforced by rich dark color, is set aside in favor of a light and almost gay scheme harmonizing with the grey stone and stucco surrounding and recalling Pinturicchio, Primaticcio, Luini, in those cycles of their work in which they told tales currently and cheerfully, rather than set moral lessons framed in deep, rich marbles. The distribution of the ovals, lozenges, and lunettes placed against the light-colored masonry almost imposed the cheerful scheme which Sargent used here, but he certainly seems to have liked it and to have worked in a joyous spirit. It was impossible for him to be vulgar at any time, but here he made refinement doubly sure by renouncing variety of color and keeping away from any cheapening boudoir-suggestion of pink and light blue.

The whole is almost cameo in character. A handsome dark blue abounds as background in the spaces to be filled and gives, as it were, the word of command to steer clear of insipidity. The figures are in one or two tones of cream-color and white, and are often quite delicious in drawing and design. A Greek vase painter coming direct from Attica or Asia Minor and down twenty-four centuries would have approved the Danaides. As for Apollo's chariot—we have said that Sargent rebelled against convention, but he well knew where and how to use a worn example; the group recalls antique gems and coins—the Rospigliosi casino and a sublimated, magnified Wedgwood all at once, and the artist has made it his by the exquisiteness of his drawing. And again, à propos of rebellion against the banal, it is interesting to see how Sargent was forced by the architectonic situation to use the focal figure (usually a lady) who for centuries has owned the central place in the dominating panel of a cycle, most surely of all, in a semi-dome. When a world-master paints a Sistine Virgin or a Madonna del Sacco, or an Assunta for the Frari, she becomes a world-figure to be sure, but to the mural painter compelled to always harbor her, she may become also an irritating figure because of her tyrannous prerogative of being the linchpin, as necessary as hub to wheel. So there she is, in the semi-dome of the Art Museum—the Lady Athene who is sheltering the Arts under her big shield. The low relief figures in stucco which act as supporters to the panels or simply as space-fillers are remarkable as indices of the painter's versatility and thoroughness combined, but they are less effective perhaps and certainly less original than some of the Library relief work. Returning to the color-scheme, it is difficult to know why Sargent put his seated Philosopher (Poet?) and Scientist in colored draperies instead of limiting them to a share with all the others in the cameo tints. They seem to détonner a little, and perhaps that is one reason why they are the least interesting things in the series.

The static appears to have appealed less to Sargent than the dynamic, even in his portraits, where there was a chance for the latter, and his best results in the majesty which may come with big repose are perhaps most seen in his prophets in spite of their spiritual struggle and their arm-tossing.

Take them altogether, the Fenway Museum and the Library should be places of pilgrimage, above all the Library. After each visit one goes away realizing more the singular good fortune of Boston and the far-seeing wisdom of McKim which brought Puvis and Abbey and Sargent under one roof.

For all the sensation that greeted the Prophets on their arrival among the Puritans, and for all the fascination of his water colors, it was Sargent, the painter of portraits, who has most preoccupied the public in England and America. From the time when he gave a fillip to the visitors to the Paris salon in his characterization of a white gown, down through the forty-years-long series in which he often delighted, sometimes immortalized, and occasionally alarmed his sitters, characterization has been admittedly his most marked quality. Its achievement is a part of the whole Sargent legend; perhaps it culminated in the Wertheimer portraits. Perhaps his sitters were not always and unreservedly grateful to him; perhaps the story that he diagnosed in paint a malady in his subject so insidious that it baffled the physicians, is a true story, and perhaps it is not.

Perhaps acquired momentum of impression counted for much; but that the impression was great and the characterization penetrating and forceful—a cloud of witnesses could rise up to testify. And style informed everything that he touched, one may even say that no matter how plebeian the subject, the treatment of it, the conception and painting of it, are patrician. Lately on the wall of the Grand Central Gallery hung the portrait of a social leader. Her type was aristocratic. He had made her look as distinguished as a race-horse or an empress, an empress as one would like her to look. Near by upon another canvas was a lady prominent in a great educational institution; she was round, rosy, comfortable, with plenty of keenness behind the comfort, not like a race-horse or an empress, but very capable of being a modern Hrotswitha, say, able to write Latin plays, and wearing her mortar board like a crown after all, and in her own fashion, terre à terre if it became necessary, but unmistakably a lady.

Said my companion, again a lady, as we stood before the canvases, "A man who can invest two such types with style and character, making both sympathetic, is a very big interpreter." And he knew how and when to seize the character and make it precipitate suddenly. He could not press this button of precipitation for a time with Wertheimer. "Finally," he said, "I deliberately asked his opinion of a certain investment—then I got him."

My comrades of the Academy of Arts and Letters will recall the kindred story which President Butler of Columbia told us at the last annual meeting of the Academy. Sargent and Roosevelt together were seeking a portrait background in the White House upstairs and downstairs and unavailingly. The President, tired of the search, said, "Sargent, the trouble with you is you don't know what you want." "The trouble with you, Mr. President, is that you don't know how to pose," was the reply. "What!" said the combative Roosevelt, "I don't know how to pose?" turning back upon the stair-case as he spoke. "That's right; hold still now; I've got you," said the painter.

Sargent the man conquered nearly all suffrages, certainly of those who knew him well. Though I met him a good many times in New York, the only period during which daily comradeship with him came to me was that of the summer of 1887 when my wife and I passed three months in the little Worcestershire village of Broadway, which Frank Millet, Alfred Parsons, and Laurence Hutton discovered for Americans, which Sargent and Abbey helped so importantly to make popular and memorable, and which became the permanent home of Mrs. Mary Anderson de Navarro. I had never seen much of Sargent in Paris, for the Seine was a kind of Rubicon between Montmartre and the Pays Latin, so that he seemed almost new to me when with Mrs. Millet and one or two others he drove over to Evesham to meet us, since in those days the locomotive did not go to Broadway. Almost my first impression was of a certain aristocratic suggestion in his manner and his speech, yet he was wholly simple and kindly and therefore was attractive. Later we learned to know him as essentially modest in spite of his already well-grown popularity as a coming painter of both the "upper and upper middle classes." Years after, having made a two hours' call at his Chelsea studio, my wife remarked as we left Tite Street, "And did you notice that Mr. Sargent is still shy?" And shy he was, though by that time his acquaintance list must have numbered most of the worth-while people in London. In fact he seemed to have had an honest dread of the kind of trivial function which is little more than the result of gregarious instinct and of a craving for such excitement as shall make no draft upon grey matter. He must have known his own value but he had the simplicity which a certain mental stature insures. We are told that Degas once said to another American artist: "So and so, why do you act as you do? Vous vous comportez comme un monsieur qui n'a pas de talent."

Neither Degas nor any other would or could have said that to Sargent. The latter was a contemner of hyperbole. When the lady asked him, "Who are those be-you-tiful creatures in your lunette?" he replied, "Just Blokes dancing," and probably concealed a grin. But if any one had countered with, "Well! if they are just Blokes, why, so were Titania and Oberon," he might well have grinned openly and admittingly. It was pleasant to see Abbey and Sargent together, working in the studio with Millet, or with all of us in the flower garden or the fourteenth century "Grange" in Worcestershire. One memory remains to me of an afternoon's sitting in the dazzling poppy patch. Sargent's study was better than those of the rest of us, but he finally shut his sketching easel and carried it indoors remarking, "Well, I'm stumped." We all followed suit and very presently a shower approved our self-judgment.

Abbey and Sargent seemed not only mutually sympathetic but also good foils,—Abbey with his intarissable fun and nonsense,—Sargent so much graver, yet both so entirely and deeply in earnest. Music was a great preoccupation with Sargent. In 1887 Bayreuth was, as to time required in reaching it, further from London than it is now, and pilgrims were not so abundant, but he left his studio more than once to go there. Mr. John Johanssen has said of him that he might have had a career as pianist; he had not quite reached that point in 1887, but he read music fluently. The Millets, who gave a dinner party almost every evening, sometimes had an overflow of guests. On such occasions Mrs. Millet sent Sargent or Abbey to dine with us in our rooms at the old Inn, the Lygon Arms. Sargent came more often than Abbey and after dinner was apt to linger over the piano playing delightfully from the Ring, or the Mastersingers, until we all struck our tents and went up to the Millets at Russell House for the rest of the evening. He certainly was a very perfect Wagnerite, but he was not a bit précieux, and played for our dancing, evening after evening. To be sure in those jazzless days, Strauss (the great Johann) reigned and the best of Wagnerites could afford to play Strauss.

He was intensely preoccupied with his work and there were stories of how it enabled him to cast off the petty annoyances of routine—of how for instance, at one time in leaving for the ship to take him to England (or America) he left also a large packet of letters and telegrams with the simple written direction to his Charge d'Affaires: "Open and answer as you think advisable." But he could play also, and was quick to seize the technique of anything new. We all had our tennis daily, and though he called himself wholly unaccustomed to it, he was good at once, particularly at the net. His sense of humor was quiet but keen. One day he said to us of a sitter, "His portrait is finished and he doesn't know it, tomorrow I shall have to break it to him." Again he had painted a lady who showed in face and bearing the fine dignity of the grief of a recent bereavement; he remarked with a rueful smile: "The family said of my portrait, 'Yes, that is Mother, but couldn't you make her a little more cheerful looking?'" In fact the humor of a situation was probably an occasional solace to him, and he summed all up in saying that upon every painter's tombstone there should be the inscription: "There was something about the mouth." As late as 1918 he said to me: "Portraits!—never again! never again!" and raised both hands in deprecation; he evidently was tired, but fortunately for his friends he continued to draw now and then, crayon heads, so quickly and easily done that they seemed to be a relaxation to him.

In person, he was, in his younger years, tall, slender, and exceedingly good looking. In later life he became so full-blooded that he said to me: "When the heat of the American summer comes, I am frightened, I want to get away to the top of a mountain where I can breathe." Beautiful studies made in the neighborhood of Aosta and Carrara are the fruit of some of his mountain journeys. He was at once so sought after and so reserved that a whole legend grew up about him. There were dozens of stories and all to his credit. Some of them, which I know to be authentic, related to actions of a very kind and generous character, performed with a really chivalrous delicacy.

Recently the oldest self-governing body of artists in the United States celebrated its centennial birthday. That one of the most grievous losses in the Art World of those last hundred years should have come through the death of an American painter is not a little noteworthy in its relation to our pride and our place in the development of Nations.

At the time of his death, John Singer Sargent was the senior by election of our American Academy of Arts and Letters. We may look back with profound self-congratulation upon having had in our ranks one of the great outstanding figures not only of contemporaneous art but of Art of all time.