I was on the point of beginning this sketch of the work of an artist to
whom distinction has come very early in life by saying, in regard to the
degree to which the subject of it enjoys the attention of the public,
that no American painter has hitherto won himself such recognition from
the expert; but I find myself pausing at the start as on the edge of a
possible solecism. Is Mr. Sargent in very fact an American painter?
The proper answer to such a question is doubtless that we shall be well
advised to pretend it, and the reason of this is simply that we have
an excellent opportunity. Born in Europe, he has also spent his life in
Europe, but none the less the burden of proof would rest with those who
should undertake to show that he is a European. Moreover he has even
on the face of it this great symptom of an American origin, that in the
line of his art he might easily be mistaken for a Frenchman. It sounds
like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look
for “American art” we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of
Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it. Mr. Sargent came up
to the irresistible city in his twentieth year, from Florence, where in
1856 he had been born of American parents and where his fortunate youth
had been spent. He entered immediately the studio of Caro-lus Duran, and
revealed himself in 1877, at the age of twenty-two, in the portrait of
that master---a fine model in more than one sense of the word. He was
already in possession of a style; and if this style has gained both
in finish and in assurance, it has not otherwise varied. As he saw and
“rendered” ten years ago, so he sees and renders to-day; and I may add
that there is no present symptom of his passing into another manner.
Those who have appreciated his work most up to the present time
articulate no wish for a change, so completely does that work seem to
them, in its kind, the exact translation of his thought, the exact “fit”
of his artistic temperament. It is difficult to imagine a young painter
less in the dark about his own ideal, more lucid and more responsible
from the first about what he desires. In an altogether exceptional
degree does he give us the sense that the intention and the art of
carrying it out are for him one and the same thing. In the brilliant
portrait of Carolus Duran, which he was speedily and strikingly to
surpass, he gave almost the full measure of this admirable peculiarity,
that perception with him is already by itself a kind of execution. It
is likewise so, of course, with many another genuine painter; but in
Sargent’s case the process by which the object seen resolves itself into
the object pictured is extraordinarily immediate. It is as if painting
were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling.
From the time of his first successes at the Salon he was hailed, I
believe, as a recruit of high value to the camp of the Impressionists,
and to-day he is for many people most conveniently pigeon-holed under
that head. It is not necessary to protest against the classification
if this addition always be made to it, that Mr. Sargent’s impressions
happen to be worthy of record. This is by no means inveterately the case
with those of the ingenuous artists who most rejoice in the title in
question. To render the impression of an object may be a very fruitful
effort, but it is not necessarily so; that will depend upon what, I
won’t say the object, but the impression, may have been. The talents
engaged in this school lie, not unjustly, as it seems to me under
the suspicion of seeking the solution of their problem exclusively in
simplification. If a painter works for other eyes as well as his own he
courts a certain danger in this direction--that of being arrested by the
cry of the spectator: “Ah! but excuse me; I myself take more impressions
than that” We feel a synthesis not to be an injustice only when it is
rich. Mr. Sargent simplifies, I think, but he simplifies with style, and
his impression is the finest form of his energy.
His work has been almost exclusively in portraiture, and it has been his
fortune to paint more women than men; therefore he has had but a limited
opportunity to reproduce that generalized grand air with which his view
of certain figures of gentlemen invests the model, which is conspicuous
in the portrait of Carolus Duran and of which his splendid “Docteur
Pozzi,” the distinguished Paris surgeon (a work not sent to the Salon),
is an admirable example. In each of these cases the model has been of
a gallant pictorial type, one of the types which strike us as made
for portraiture (which is by no means the way of all), as especially
appears, for instance, in the handsome hands and frilled wrists of M.
Carolus, whose cane rests in his fine fingers as if it were the hilt
of a rapier. The most brilliant of all Mr. Sargent’s productions is the
portrait of a young lady, the magnificent picture which he exhibited
in 1881; and if it has mainly been his fortune since to commemorate the
fair faces of women, there is no ground for surprise at this sort of
success on the part of one who had given so signal a proof of possessing
the secret of the particular aspect that the contemporary lady (of any
period) likes to wear in the eyes of posterity. Painted when he was
but four-and-twenty years of age, the picture by which Mr. Sargent was
represented at the Salon of 1881 is a performance which may well have
made any critic of imagination rather anxious about his future. In
common with the superb group of the children of Mr. Edward Boit,
exhibited two years later, it offers the slightly “uncanny” spectacle of
a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to
learn. It is not simply precocity in the guise of maturity--a phenomenon
we very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is the
freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really
felt and assimilated, of generations. My admiration for this deeply
distinguished work is such that I am perhaps in danger of overstating
its merits; but it is worth taking into account that to-day, after
several years’ acquaintance with them, these merits seem to me more and
more to justify enthusiasm. The picture has this sign of productions of
the first order, that its style clearly would save it if everything else
should change--our measure of its value of resemblance, its expression
of character, the fashion of dress, the particular associations it
evokes. It is not only a portrait, but a picture, and it arouses even
in the profane spectator something of the painter’s sense, the joy of
engaging also, by sympathy, in the solution of the artistic problem.
There are works of which it is sometimes said that they are painters’
pictures (this description is apt to be intended invidiously), and the
production of which I speak has the good-fortune at once to belong to
this class and to give the “plain man” the kind of pleasure that the
plain man looks for.
The young lady, dressed in black satin, stands upright, with her right
hand bent back, resting on her waist, while the other, with the arm
somewhat extended, offers to view a single white flower. The dress.
stretched at the hips over a sort of hoop, and ornamented in front,
where it opens on a velvet petticoat with large satin bows, has an
old-fashioned air, as if it had been worn by some demure princess who
might have sat for Velasquez. The hair, of which the arrangement is odd
and charming, is disposed in two or three large curls fastened at one
side over the temple with a comb. Behind the figure is the vague faded
sheen, exquisite in tone, of a silk curtain, light, undefined, and
losing itself at the bottom. The face is young, candid and peculiar. Out
of these few elements the artist has constructed a picture which it is
impossible to forget, of which the most striking characteristic is
its simplicity, and yet which overflows with perfection. Painted with
extraordinary breadth and freedom, so that surface and texture are
interpreted by the lightest hand, it glows with life, character and
distinction, and strikes us as the most complete--with one exception
perhaps--of the author’s productions. I know not why this representation
of a young girl in black, engaged in the casual gesture of holding up
a flower, should make so ineffaceable an impression and tempt one to
become almost lyrical in its praise; but I remember that, encountering
the picture unexpectedly in New York a year or two after it had been
exhibited in Paris, it seemed to me to have acquired an extraordinary
general value, to stand for more artistic truth than it would be easy to
formulate. The language of painting, the tongue in which, exclusively,
Mr. Sargent expresses himself, is a medium into which a considerable
part of the public, for the simple an excellent reason that they don’t
understand it, will doubtless always be reluctant and unable to follow
him.
Two years before he exhibited the young lady in black, in 1879, Mr.
Sargent had spent several months in Spain, and here, even more than he
had already been, the great Velasquez became the god of his idolatry.
No scenes are more delightful to the imagination than those in which
we figure youth and genius confronted with great examples, and if such
matters did not belong to the domain of private life we might entertain
ourselves with reconstructing the episode of the first visit to the
museum of Madrid, the shrine of the painter of Philip IV., of a
young Franco-American worshipper of the highest artistic sensibility,
expecting a supreme revelation and prepared to fall on his knees. It is
evident that Mr. Sargent fell on his knees and that in this attitude he
passed a considerable part of his sojourn in Spain. He is various and
experimental; if I am not mistaken, he sees each work that he produces
in a light of its own, not turning off successive portraits according
to some well-tried receipt which has proved useful in the case of their
predecessors; nevertheless there is one idea that pervades them all, in
a different degree, and gives them a family resemblance--the idea that
it would be inspiring to know just how Velasquez would have treated
the theme. We can fancy that on each occasion Mr. Sargent, as a
solemn preliminary, invokes him as a patron saint. This is not, in my
intention, tantamount to saying that the large canvas representing the
contortions of a dancer in the lamp-lit room of a _posada_, which he
exhibited on his return from Spain, strikes me as having come into the
world under the same star as those compositions of the great Spaniard
which at Madrid alternate with his royal portraits. This singular work,
which has found an appreciative home in Boston, has the stamp of
an extraordinary energy and facility--of an actual scene, with its
accidents and peculiarities caught, as distinguished from a composition
where arrangement and invention have played their part. It looks like
life, but it looks also, to my view, rather like a perversion of life,
and has the quality of an enormous “note” or memorandum, rather than of
a representation. A woman in a voluminous white silk dress and a black
mantilla pirouettes in the middle of a dusky room, to the accompaniment
of her own castanets and that of a row of men and women who sit in straw
chairs against the whitewashed wall and thrum upon guitar and tambourine
or lift other castanets into the air. She appears almost colossal, and
the twisted and inflated folds of her long dress increase her volume.
She simpers, in profile, with a long chin, while she slants back at a
dangerous angle, and the lamplight (it proceeds from below, as if she
were on a big platform) makes a strange play in her large face. In the
background the straight line of black-clad, black-hatted, white-shirted
musicians projects shadows against the wall, on which placards, guitars,
and dirty finger-marks display themselves. The merit of this production
is that the air of reality is given in it with remarkable breadth and
boldness; its defect it is difficult to express save by saying that it
makes the spectator vaguely uneasy and even unhappy--an accident the
more to be regretted as a lithe, inspired female figure, given up to
the emotion of the dance, is not intrinsically a displeasing object.
“El Jaleo” sins, in my opinion, in the direction of ugliness, and,
independently of the fact that the heroine is circling round incommoded
by her petticoats, has a want of serenity.
This is not the defect of the charming, dusky, white-robed person who,
in the Tangerine subject exhibited at the Salon of 1880 (the fruit of
an excursion to the African coast at the time of the artist’s visit to
Spain), stands on a rug, under a great white Moorish arch, and from out
of the shadows of the large drapery, raised pentwise by her hands, which
covers her head, looks down, with painted eyes and brows showing above
a bandaged mouth, at the fumes of a beautiful censer or chafing-dish
placed on the carpet. I know not who this stately Mahometan may be, nor
in what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged; but
in her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes, under her
plastered arcade which shines in the Eastern light, she transports and
torments us. The picture is exquisite, a radiant effect of white upon
white, of similar but discriminated tones. In dividing the honor that
Mr. Sargent has won by his finest work between the portrait of the young
lady of 1881 and the group of four little girls which was painted in
1882 and exhibited with the success it deserved the following year, I
must be careful to give the latter picture not too small a share. The
artist has done nothing more felicitous and interesting than this view
of a rich dim, rather generalized French interior (the perspective of a
hall with a shining floor, where screens and tall Japanese vases
shimmer and loom), which encloses the life and seems to form the happy
play-world of a family of charming children. The treatment is eminently
unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of
the figures in the foreground. The place is regarded as a whole; it is
a scene, a comprehensive impression; yet none the less do the little
figures in their white pinafores (when was the pinafore ever painted
with that power and made so poetic?) detach themselves and live with a
personal life. Two of the sisters stand hand in hand at the back, in
the delightful, the almost equal, company of a pair of immensely tall
emblazoned jars, which overtop them and seem also to partake of the life
of the picture; the splendid porcelain and the aprons of the children
shine together, while a mirror in the brown depth behind them catches
the light. Another little girl presents herself, with abundant tresses
and slim legs, her hands behind her, quite to the left; and the
youngest, nearest to the spectator, sits on the floor and plays with her
doll. The naturalness of the composition, the loveliness of the complete
effect, the light, free’ security of the execution, the sense it gives
us as of assimilated secrets and of instinct and knowledge playing
together--all this makes the picture as astonishing a work on the part
of a young man of twenty-six as the portrait of 1881 was astonishing on
the part of a young man of twenty-four.
It is these remarkable encounters that justify us in writing almost
prematurely of a career which is not yet half unfolded. Mr. Sargent is
sometimes accused of a want of “finish,” but if finish means the last
word of expressiveness of touch, “The Hall with the Four Children,” as
we may call it, may-stand as a permanent reference on this point. If the
picture of the Spanish dancer illustrates, as it seems to me to do, the
latent dangers of the Impressionist practice, so this finer performance
shows what victories it may achieve. And in relation to the latter I
must repeat what I said about the young lady with the flower, that this
is the sort of work which, when produced in youth, leads the attentive
spectator to ask unanswerable questions. He finds himself murmuring,
“Yes, but what is left?” and even wondering whether it be an advantage
to an artist to obtain early in life such possession of his means that
the struggle with them, discipline, _tâtonnement_, cease to exist for
him. May not this breed an irresponsibility of cleverness, a wantonness,
an irreverence--what is vulgarly termed a “larkiness”--on the part of
the youthful genius who has, as it were, all his fortune in his pocket?
Such are the possibly superfluous broodings of those who are critical
even in their warmest admirations and who sometimes suspect that it may
be better for an artist to have a certain part of his property invested
in unsolved difficulties. When this is not the case, the question with
regard to his future simplifies itself somewhat portentously. “What will
he do with it?” we ask, meaning by the pronoun the sharp, completely
forged weapon. It becomes more purely a question of responsibility, and
we hold him altogether to a higher account. This is the case with Mr.
Sargent; he knows so much about the art of painting that he perhaps does
not fear emergencies quite enough, and that having knowledge to spare
he may be tempted to play with it and waste it. Various, curious, as we
have called him, he occasionally tries experiments which seem to arise
from the mere high spirits of his brush, and runs risks little courted
by the votaries of the literal, who never expose their necks to escape
from the common. For the literal and the common he has the smallest
taste; when he renders an object into the language of painting his
translation is a generous paraphrase.
As I have intimated, he has painted little but portraits; but he has
painted very many of these, and I shall not attempt in so few pages to
give a catalogue of his works. Every canvas that has come from his hands
has not figured at the Salon; some of them have seen the light at other
exhibitions in Paris; some of them in London (of which city Mr. Sargent
is now an inhabitant), at the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery.
If he has been mainly represented by portraits there are two or three
little subject-pictures of which I retain a grateful memory. There
stands out in particular, as a pure gem, a small picture exhibited at
the Grosvenor, representing a small group of Venetian girls of the lower
class, sitting in gossip together one summer’s day in the big, dim
hall of a shabby old palazzo. The shutters let in a clink of light; the
scagliola pavement gleams faintly in it; the whole place is bathed in
a kind of transparent shade. The girls are vaguely engaged in some very
humble household work; they are counting turnips or stringing onions,
and these small vegetables, enchantingly painted, look as valuable as
magnified pearls. The figures are extraordinarily natural and vivid;
wonderfully light and fine is the touch by which the painter evokes
the small familiar Venetian realities (he has handled them with a vigor
altogether peculiar in various other studies which I have not space to
enumerate), and keeps the whole thing free from that element of humbug
which has ever attended most attempts to reproduce the idiosyncrasies
of Italy. I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks without
having mentioned a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field of
portraiture with which Mr. Sargent’s name is preponderantly associated.
I jumped from his “Carolus Duran” to the masterpiece of 1881 without
speaking of the charming “Madame Pailleron” of 1879, or the picture of
this lady’s children the following year. Many, or rather most, of Mr.
Sargent’s sitters have been French, and he has studied the physiognomy
of this nation so attentively that a little of it perhaps remains in
the brush with which to-day, more than in his first years, he represents
other types. I have alluded to his superb “Docteur Pozzi,” to whose very
handsome, still youthful head and slightly artificial posture he has
given so fine a French cast that he might be excused if he should, even
on remoter pretexts, find himself reverting to it. This gentleman stands
up in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the _prestance_ of a princely
Vandyck. I should like to commemorate the portrait of a lady of a
certain age and of an equally certain interest of appearance--a lady
in black, with black hair, a black hat and a vast feather, which
was displayed at that entertaining little annual exhibition of the
“Mirlitons,” in the Place Vendôme. With the exquisite modelling of its
face (no one better than Mr. Sargent understands the beauty that resides
in exceeding fineness), this head remains in my mind as a masterly
rendering of the look of experience--such experience as may be
attributed to a woman slightly faded and eminently distinguished.
Subject and treatment in this valuable piece are of an equal interest,
and in the latter there is an element of positive sympathy which is not
always in a high degree the sign of Mr. Sargent’s work. What shall I say
of the remarkable canvas which, on the occasion of the Salon of 1884,
brought the critics about our artist’s ears, the already celebrated
portrait of “Madame G.?” It is an experiment of a highly original kind,
and the painter has had in the case, in regard to what Mr. Ruskin would
call the “rightness” of his attempt, the courage of his opinion. A
contestable beauty, according to Parisian fame, the lady stands upright
beside a table on which her right arm rests, with her body almost
fronting the spectator and her face in complete profile. She wears an
entirely sleeveless dress of black satin, against which her admirable
left arm detaches itself; the line of her harmonious profile has a
sharpness which Mr. Sargent does not always seek, and the crescent of
Diana, an ornament in diamonds, rests on her singular head. This work
had not the good-fortune to please the public at large, and I believe it
even excited a kind of unreasoned scandal--an idea sufficiently amusing
in the light of some of the manifestations of the plastic effort to
which, each year, the Salon stands sponsor. This superb picture, noble
in conception and masterly in line, gives to the figure represented
something of the high relief of the profiled images on great friezes.
It is a work to take or to leave, as the phrase is, and one in regard to
which the question of liking or disliking comes promptly to be settled.
The author has never gone further in being boldly and consistently
himself.
Two of Mr. Sargent’s recent productions have been portraits of American
ladies whom it must have been a delight to paint; I allude to those of
Lady Playfair and Mrs. Henry White, both of which were seen in the Royal
Academy of 1885, and the former subsequently in Boston, where it abides.
These things possess, largely, the quality which makes Mr. Sargent so
happy as a painter of women--a quality which can best be expressed by a
reference to what it is not, to the curiously literal, prosaic, sexless
treatment to which, in the commonplace work that looks down at us from
the walls of almost all exhibitions, delicate feminine elements have
evidently so often been sacrificed. Mr. Sargent handles these elements
with a special feeling for them, and they borrow a kind of noble
intensity from his brush. This intensity is not absent from the two
portraits I just mentioned, that of Lady Playfair and that of Mrs. Henry
White; it looks out at us from the erect head and frank animation of
the one, and the silvery sheen and shimmer of white satin and white lace
which form the setting of the slim tall-ness of the other. In the Royal
Academy of 1886 Mr. Sargent was represented by three important canvases,
all of which reminded the spectator of how much the brilliant effect he
produces in an English exhibition arises from a certain appearance that
he has of looking down from a height, a height of cleverness, a sensible
giddiness of facility, at the artistic problems of the given case.
Sometimes there is even a slight impertinence in it; that, doubtless,
was the impression of many of the people who passed, staring, with an
ejaculation, before the triumphant group of the three Misses V. These
young ladies, seated in a row, with a room much foreshortened for a
background, and treated with a certain familiarity of frankness, excited
in London a chorus of murmurs not dissimilar to that which it had been
the fortune of the portrait exhibited in 1884 to elicit in Paris, and
had the further privilege of drawing forth some prodigies of purblind
criticism. Works of this character are a genuine service; after the
short-lived gibes of the profane have subsided, they are found to have
cleared the air. They remind people that the faculty of taking a direct,
independent, unborrowed impression is not altogether lost.
In this very rapid review I have accompanied Mr. Sargent to a very
recent date. If I have said that observers encumbered with a nervous
temperament may at any moment have been anxious about his future, I have
it on my conscience to add that the day has not yet come for a complete
extinction of this anxiety. Mr. Sargent is so young, in spite of the
place allotted to him in these pages, so often a record of long careers
and uncontested triumphs that, in spite also of the admirable works he
has already produced, his future is the most valuable thing he has
to show. We may still ask ourselves what he will do with it, while we
indulge the hope that he will see fit to give successors to the two
pictures which I have spoken of emphatically as his finest. There is
no greater work of art than a great portrait--a truth to be constantly
taken to heart by a painter holding in his hands the weapon that Mr.
Sargent wields. The gift that he possesses he possesses completely--the
immediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside the
question of the subject (and to a great portrait a common sitter will
doubtless not always contribute), the highest result is achieved when
to this element of quick perception a certain faculty of brooding
reflection is added. I use this name for want of a better, and I mean
the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject,
undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not
on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in
short, enlarges and humanizes the technical problem.