takes the form of contempt. It is the distortion of his character or the
bias to its flaws produced by opposition. Conviction has stiffened into
arrogance, individuality become deflected toward an attitude of pose.
These blemishes are absent from his work, which is always serene and
lovable; they are merely incidental to the man and should not enter into
an appreciation of his art, except that he has himself forced a
recognition of them even upon his admirers. It is this aspect of him
which Boldini has thrust upon the world in his well-known portrait. I
have always resented it, for it is founded only on partial fact,
suppressing the better facts and smacking too much of Boldini himself
and of the pruriency of suggestion, with which he has invested so many
portraits. The Whistler that we see in this picture, sitting sideways on
a chair, his elbow on the back of it and his long fingers thrust through
the snaky black hair, represents the last word in modernity; thrilling
with nervous vibration, keyed to snapping intensity; a creation of
brilliant egoism, quivering on the edge of insanity; the quintessence of
refined callousness and subtlety. How much truer to the man and the
artist is Rajon’s portrait; nimbly impressionable, clever and elegant,
the lurking devil in
[Illustration:
From the Luxembourg Gallery.
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER.
BY JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER.]
[Illustration:
From the collection of Colonel Frank J. Hecker.
THE MUSIC ROOM.
BY JAMES A. MCNEILL WHISTLER.]
the eye and touch of cynicism on the lip not enough to disguise an
underlying sweetness and freshness of mind. The other, in its
half-truth, is a travesty; this one, very expressive of the mingled
qualities of this remarkable man.
For none but a man of peculiar sweetness of mind could have conceived
that masterpiece in the Luxembourg, “The Portrait of My Mother.” Garbed
in black, as you will remember, she sits in profile, with her feet upon
a footstool and her hands laid peacefully and elegantly on her lap; the
lawn and lace of her cap delicately silhouetted against the gray wall.
She gazes with tranquil intensity beyond the limit of our comprehension
along the vista of memories, leading back through maternity to a
beautiful youth. Nor is there any cynicism in “The White Girl,” that
symphony in white, rejected at the Salon of 1863, when the artist was
twenty-nine years old, but conspicuous in the _Salon des Refusés_. The
girl stands mysteriously aloof from all contact with, or suggestion of,
the world, her dark eyes staring with a troubled, wistful look, as if
she had been surprised in her maiden meditation and were apprehensive of
something she cannot fathom, and is too reliant upon herself to wholly
fear. The picture is no brilliant epitome of shallowness, but an almost
reverential conception, in exquisitely idealized degree, of the poetry
of maidenhood, maturing normally. In both these pictures, which come as
near as anything which Whistler has done to the generally accepted idea
of a subject, it is the significance, in the one case of motherhood, in
the other of maidenhood, that he has dwelt upon, and in both with the
fullest reliance upon the æsthetic suggestion to the sense,
respectively, of black and gray, and of white, elaborated to an extreme
of subtlety. It would be impossible, I mean, that the colour schemes,
for example, could be reversed; each is so intentionally and
conclusively the language fitted to the idea, that one might as well try
to put the words of Juliet into the mouth of Volumnia.
In pictures like “The Music Room,” there is a further step toward
abstraction. So far as it represents the interior of a room with walls
of ivory-white set off with dainty rose-sprigged curtains, in which a
lady in black riding-habit stands by a marble mantelpiece, while a child
in white frock sits a little farther back reading, it is a _genre_
picture of that sort that Alfred Stevens painted, done not for any
particular significance in the figures, but for the opportunity which it
yields of a delicate scheme of colour and exquisite adjustment of
values, and for the pure enjoyment of representing the æsthetic
significance of these qualities. But it is at once more subtle and more
daring than Stevens could have wrought. It involves a problem, the very
difficulty of which no doubt keyed the artist to enthusiasm, to keep the
child in white behind the figure in black, and to make the latter a
distinguished ornament in the picture, while still preserving its pliant
relation to its light surroundings--a problem not improbably suggested,
in part at least, by one of Outamaro’s prints, at any rate in its
Caucasian transposition worthy to be compared with the work of the
Japanese master. Nor is it only a problem in skill. Jet is beautiful in
tone and texture, and so is ivory, and the combination of the two, set
off with delicate accents of rose, creates a beauty of its own.
“Variations in Flesh and Green--The Balcony” may be selected as a still
further advance toward abstract sensation and expression. These girls in
kimonas, standing, sitting, and reclining on the edge of a river with a
glimpse of factory chimneys across the water, mean nothing in a
“subject” sense, and lack even the reasonableness of the figures in the
previous picture. They are parts of a fantasy, pure and simple, to which
they contribute impersonally; an artist’s dream of atmosphere and
colour, which you will enjoy or not, according as you can enter into the
abstract intention of the artist. Reaching the essence of beauty to a
degree still less alloyed is such a picture as “Bognor--Nocturne”: blue
smooth water with shadowy shapes of trawlers gliding like dusky
phantoms, and of figures standing in the shallow surf; blue sky and
atmosphere, penetrated with silvery luminousness. It is a scene of
exquisite refreshment to the spirit, mysteriously etherealized, the
artist being so absorbed with the spiritual presence of the summer night
that his own soul echoes its very heart-beats.
[Illustration:
From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.
NOCTURE—BOGNOR
By James A. McNeill Whistler.]
Once again, then, in all these pictures, it is the essence or innermost
significance of the theme that Whistler treats; itself a quality so
immaterial that he shrinks from expressing even matter in too distinct
or tangible a form, enveloping it in a shrouded light, representing it
as a concord of coloured masses with a preference for delicate monotony
of hues and soft accentuations, seeking by all means to spiritualize the
material. And this without loss of stateliness; he has learned the
dignity of the great line from Velasquez, and from him, too, the
magisterial use of blacks and grays. Nor with the wild irrelevance of
the visionary; there are piquancy and virility in all his pictures, not
of lively colour and rampageous brush work, but attained through subtle
surprises of detail and decorative originality--qualities gleaned from
the Japanese. Again, in the trancelike intensity of Rossetti’s figures,
he may have found a quality akin to his own spirituality of sentiment,
just as his love of light and of delicate discrimination of values links
his art to that of the impressionists. And out of these various
influences, his own personality, irresistibly original, at once fanciful
and penetrating, serene and nervous, permeated with the quintessence of
sensuous refinement, he has fashioned for himself a language “faithful
to the colouring of his own spirit,” in the strictest sense original and
stamped with style--a style that is simple, earnest, grand.
[Illustration:
From the collection of Charles L. Feer, Esq.
THE BALCONY.
By James A. McNeill Whistler.]
And even closer precision of personal expression appears in Whistler’s
etchings. For to one who seeks to render, not the facts, but his sense
of the facts, etching offers greater freedom than painting. It is the
art of all others which permits an artist to be recognized by what he
_omits_, the one in which the means employed may be most pregnant of
suggestion and in closest accord with the personal idiosyncrasy of the
man. To Whistler, therefore, with his intense individuality, his
discerning search for the significance of beauty and his instinct for
simplicity and economy of means which will yet yield a full complexity
of meaning, etching early became a cherished form of expression. In the
“Little French Series” (1858), the “Thames Series” (1871), the “First
Venice Series” (1880), and the “Second Venice Series” (1887), as well as
in other plates etched in France, Holland, and Belgium, he has proved
himself the greatest master of the needle since Rembrandt. Indeed, the
eminent painter-etcher and connoisseur, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, is
credited with the assertion that, if he had to dispose of either his
Rembrandts or his Whistlers, it would be the former that he would
relinquish.
There is a great difference, even in the point of view, between the
Dutch master and his modern rival. Both approached their subject, if one
may say so, in a reverential way; but the former with an absorption in
the scene and a desire to reproduce it faithfully. Whistler, on the
other hand, with more aloofness of feeling, selecting the mood or phase
of it on which he chooses to dwell that he may inform it with his own
personal sense of significance. The Rembrandt print--to borrow De
Quincey’s distinction--is rather a triumph of knowledge; the Whistler a
triumph of power. While the method of both represents the highest degree
of pregnant succinctness, Rembrandt drew the landscape while Whistler
transposes from it. The visible means, in his later etchings, become
less and less, their significance continually fuller; and in his study
of phases of nature he has carried the interpretation of light and
atmosphere beyond the limits of Rembrandt.
In the “Thames Series,” which has perpetuated the since vanished
characteristics of the old river side, he came nearest to the Dutch
etcher, recording the scenes with a comprehension of detail as complete
as that of Rembrandt’s “Mill.” Seeking always the significance of his
subject, he seems to have felt that here the significance lay in the
curious, dilapidated medley of details; that even a weather-worn timber
and the very nails in it contributed their share to the impression, so
that, while he must needs select and omit, the problem was one of how
much to _avoid_ omitting. On the other hand, in his later prints, the
problem is reversed. Following his own personal evolution toward more
complete abstraction, both in sense and expression, it is how little he
may put in and yet express the full significance.
Whistler’s art, in brief, is logically related, alike to realism, to the
poetry of the men of 1830, and to the motives of the impressionists, and
represents the wider influence of his times in its keen analysis of
phenomena and the independently personal bias he has given to it; in the
search for new sensations of the most subtle kind and in a tendency at
times to exalt good manners, that is to say style, above the qualities
of intrinsic merit. His art has been too much a product of himself,
notwithstanding that it reflects in spiritualized form the higher
tendencies of his age, for him to have been the founder of a school or
to have influenced followers directly. Yet, indirectly, his influence
has been weighty. Alike by his example and by his pungent utterances he
has been instrumental, more than others, in giving a _quietus_ to
mediocrity in art, both to the bathos of the literary picture and to the
banality of merely imitative painting. Mediocrity still lingers and must
linger as long as commonplace minds devote themselves to painting; but
its prestige has been so successfully impaired that now we regard a
taste for it on the part of a collector of pictures as an infantile
disease, like the measles, incidental to an early career of
appreciation, though not necessarily fatal to more matured
connoisseurship.
Whether we shall ever reach that degree of cultivation which will need
no further stimulus to enjoyment in a picture than such abstract
suggestion to the imagination as music affords, time alone will show.
Meanwhile, as we are able to conceive of a picture now, it has its
genesis in the concrete, from which even Whistler has not tried to
emancipate himself entirely. There is a beautiful humanity in most of
his work, the humanity of human nature or the human relation of the
landscape to ourselves; and if he is able sometimes to enchant us
without any apparent human significance, it is because he is Whistler--a
genius.
IV
JOHN SINGER SARGENT
A summary of John S. Sargent’s position as an artist must recall the
exhibition of his work shown at Copley Hall, Boston, in 1899. There were
exhibited some fifty portraits and seventy-five sketches and studies,
while hard by in the Museum hung his large subject picture, “El Jaleo,”
and in the library could be seen his mural decorations. It was an
impressive showing, both in amount and quality, for an artist then
little over forty years of age.
But Sargent has been a favoured child of the Muses, and early reached a
maturity for which others have to labour long and in the face of
disappointments. He, however, had never anything to unlearn. From the
first he came under the influence of taste and style, the qualities
which to this day most distinguish his work. The son of a Massachusetts
gentleman who had retired from the practice of medicine in Philadelphia,
he was born in Florence, and there spent his youth. The home life was
penetrated with refinement; a good classical and modern education came
in due course, and all around him were the dignity and beauty of
Florence, its tender beauty of atmosphere and colour and the noble
memorials of its galleries and streets. Perhaps no city in the world has
so distinctive a spirit, at once stimulating to the intellect and
refining to the senses. Those of us who have felt it only after years of
buffeting in a grosser atmosphere can but guess what it means to have
come under its influence from childhood, during the impressionable
period of youth up to eighteen. And not as a mere resident of the place,
from the force of habit purblind to its charm, but quickened by parents
who themselves were products of another kind of civilization, keen to
appreciate, to absorb, and to live in its spirit; possessed, also, of
the American temperament so alert and sensitive to impressions, while
removed from the dulling influence of our exceeding practicalness.
When the young Sargent knocked at the studio of Carolus-Duran in the
_Boulevard Montparnasse_ with a portfolio of studies under his arm,
drawings from Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, he was no smart young
student, full of up-to-date ideas. Very modest he is described as being,
of quiet, reflective disposition, pleased that his drawings won the
approval of the master and the
[Illustration: CARMENCITA.
BY JOHN S. SARGENT.]
[Illustration:
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND.
BY JOHN S. SARGENT.]
enthusiasm of the students, and eager to set himself to learn. With a
facility that was partly a natural gift, partly the result of a steady
acceptance of the problems presented, he proceeded to absorb the master;
his breadth of picturesque style and refined pictorial sense, his sound
and scientific method, not devoid of certain tricks of illusion and his
piquant and persuasive modernity--the sum total of an art that was a
modern Frenchman’s paraphrase of one of the biggest of the old masters,
Velasquez. At twenty-three he painted a portrait of Carolus, which shows
he had absorbed his master so thoroughly as to be unconscious of the
incidentals of his method and to have grasped only the essentials with
such complete assimilation, that what he produces is already his own.
Later, he himself visited Madrid and came under the direct spell of
Velasquez. The grand line he had learned while still a boy, and from
Carolus the seeing of colour as coloured light, the modelling in planes,
the mysteries of sharp and vanishing outlines, appearing and reappearing
under the natural action of light, realism of observation at once
brilliant and refined, large and penetrating; and all these qualities he
found united in the subtly grandiose canvases of the great Spaniard.
Finally, from all these influences, he has fashioned a method very much
his own.
And how shall one describe this method? It reveals the alertness and
versatility of the American temperament. Nothing escapes his
observation, up to a certain point at least; he is never tired of fresh
experiment; never repeats his compositions and schemes of colour, nor
shows perfunctoriness or weariness of brush. In all his work there is a
vivid meaningfulness; in his portraits, especially, an amazing
suggestion of actuality. On the other hand, his virtuosity is largely
French, reaching a perfection of assurance that the quick-witted
American is, for the most part, in too great a hurry to acquire; a
patient perfection, not reliant upon mere impression or force of
temperament. In its abounding resourcefulness there is a mingling of
audacity and conscientiousness; a facility so complete that the acts of
perception and of execution seem identical, and an honesty that does not
shrink from admitting that such and such a point was unattainable by
him, or that to have attained it would have disturbed the balance of the
whole. And yet this virtuosity, though it is French in character, is
free of the French manner, as indeed of any mannerism. For example, his
English men and women, his English children especially, belong
distinctly to English life. Though he may portray them in terms of
Parisian technique, he never confuses the idioms, being far too keenly
alive to the subtle differences of race.
This skill of hand is at the service of a brilliant pictorial sense.
Like a true painter, he sees a picture in everything he studies. Perhaps
it would be truer to say that he sees _the_ picture, the one which for
the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he
is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth,
rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be
impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness
and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his
canvases a distinct æsthetic charm; grandiose, for example, in the
portrait of “Lady Elcho, Mrs. Arden, and Mrs. Tennant,” ravishingly
elegant in the “Mrs. Meyer and Children,” delicately quaint in the
“Beatrix,” and so on through a range of motives, each variously
characterized by grandeur of line, suppleness of arrangement, and
fascinating surprise of detail; used with extraordinary originality, but
always conformable to an instinctive sense of balance and rhythm. And
then, too, how tactful is the selection of pose, costume, and
accessories! With what taste he creates environment for his conception
of the subject!
It is, however, in regard to the conception of his subject that Sargent
challenges criticism. How far does he render the character of the
sitter? To say that his characterization is slap-dash and superficial
is, surely, going too far. It was confuted by that exhibition of fifty
portraits, which represented at least fifty distinct persons. Nor with
that panorama of his art in one’s memory can one admit that he has no
real sympathy with his sitters. Very possibly, however, it is not a
_personal_ sympathy, and for two reasons. He is a picture maker before
he is a portraitist, and in portraiture has less interest in the
individual than in the type which he or she represents. This latter
particular is symptomatic, partly of the artist himself and partly of
his times. He is not of the world in which he plays so conspicuous a
part, but preserves an aloofness from it and studies it with the
collectedness of an onlooker interested in the moving show and in its
general trends of motive, but with an individual sympathy only
occasionally elicited, as when he paints Georg Henschel, like himself, a
musician. Again it is an affectation of the class from which most of his
sitters, especially the ladies, are drawn to exhibit the studied
unconviction so deliciously represented in Anthony Hope’s “Dolly
Dialogues.” The elegant shallowness of so many of his portraits is true
enough in a general way, and very likely in the individual case. There
is another type, embodying the thinking-for-herself and the greater
latitude of action of the modern woman. They are, to a certain extent,
the product of an age of nerves, and in his portraits of them there is
perceptible an equivalent restlessness of manner, a highly strung
intention, almost a stringiness of nervous expression. Again, I can
recall in the Boston exhibition two portraits of ladies whose _esprit_
was of a kind that quiet folks would consider fast. Their cases also had
been keenly diagnosed and met with the skill of an artist who did not
care to extenuate, nor on the other hand had fallen under personal
subjection to the physical attractiveness, but set down what he saw and
surrounded it with the elegant atmosphere that was its salvation in real
life. It is here that he compares to such advantage with a painter like
Boldini. Sargent has instinctive refinement. It would be quite
impossible for him to have any feelings toward his subjects other than
those of a true gentleman; and, though he may represent in a lady a full
flavour of the modern spirit, he never allows the modernity to exceed
the limits of good taste. For the same reason Sargent’s pictures, though
many of them have a restlessness of their own, seem quiet alongside
Boldini’s. The latter makes a motive of nervous tenuosity, and his
pictures, if seen frequently, become wiry in suggestion, and defeat
their own purpose of being vibrative; but Sargent’s, controlled by a
fine sobriety of feeling, another phase of his unfailing taste and tact,
retain their suppleness. Their actuality is all the more convincing
because it is not the motive, but an incident.
Yet, even so, this actuality is of a very different quality from that
reached by the old masters. I have in mind an inevitable comparison,
suggested by his portrait of Mr. Marquand in the Metropolitan Museum
with one by Titian on the same wall and with a Franz Hals, a Velasquez,
and a Rembrandt in an adjoining gallery. In all these latter there is a
gravity of feeling that is not alone due to the subduing effects of
time; while Sargent’s portrait, even apart from the sleek fatness of the
brush work which age will mature, is the product of a habit of mind
altogether different. It lacks the intimacy of the “Wife” of Franz Hals,
the penetrating depth of the “Doge Grimani,” the quiet assurance of
Velasquez’s “Don Carlos,” and the intense sympathy of the Rembrandt,
though the last two are only moderate examples of the masters. Instead,
it reveals a certain assertiveness in its assurance, an intensity of
nervous force rather than of intellectual or sympathetic effort, a
brilliant epitome rather than a profound study. It has not the
permanence of feeling, either in its characterization or method; that
suggestion of perennial, stable truth, which, so far as we can judge
from the past, would insure it a place among the great old masters of
the future. Among the masters we may feel certain that Sargent will be
reckoned as having been one of the most conspicuous figures of his age;
but his vogue will rise and dwindle according to the amount of interest
felt for the time being in the age which he represented; it will
scarcely have that inevitableness of conviction, which, when once
recognized, must abide. If this forecast is correct, the reason is that
Sargent, though raised above his time, scarcely reveals in his portraits
elevation of mind; he has the clear eye of the philosopher without his
depth and breadth of vision; he has possessed himself of his age, and
the age has taken possession of him. He swims on its sea with strokes of
magnificent assurance, but with a vision bounded by the little surface
waves around him; he has not sat above upon the cliffs, quietly
pondering its wider and grander movements.