I once had occasion to call on Mr. Sargent, and was shown into a room
with a black carpet. Only a colourist loves black, and sees it as a
colour. And this room, so free from all that was novel and without
associations, helped to explain to me why, though his method is so
modern and of the moment, his pictures of aristocrats accommodate
themselves to ancestral surroundings. For it is true that not only the
face and the clothes of his sitters are given, but somehow, in the
material of paint, their social position and their distinction. Now this
is not by any means the least of Sargent's qualities; it is not a common
one. Well-bred people drive up to the door of a modern studio almost
visibly cloaked in the traditions of their race, but we are led to
believe that they must have left all this behind them in the carriage
when we see the portrait in an exhibition; the artist has shown nothing
of it, has used his distinguished sitter simply as a model. For lack of
inspiration novelties are proffered in its place, _L'art nouveau_ on
canvas. Sargent does not paint modern people as if they all came into
the world yesterday landed from an airship. No, he is like Van Dyck, who
not only painted the beautiful clothes, the long white hands, and the
bearing of his sitters sympathetically, but also the very atmosphere of
the Court around them, painting, as all great painters do, invisible as
well as visible things. If there is not in Sargent's painting courtesy
of touch, if his method has not suavity in painting elegant people, this
is rather as it should be in an age which trusts implicitly to the
dressmaker and tailor for its elegance. And without a word here as to
the worth of some of our modern aims, at least the age is too much in
earnest for a pose. The poses and fripperies of the pictures of Van Dyck
and Kneller are done with; and besides, the modern baronet is not
anxious to show his hands, but is painted gloved, and Work goes
unimmortalised. Meunier the sculptor and other modern artists having
gloried in the war of labour, its victories go unsung; its victors
surviving only as fashionable men.
The portraits of some painters suggest nothing but the foreign
atmosphere of a studio, but Sargent seems to meet his sitters in the
atmosphere of their own daily, fashionable life, and that is why his
pictures are romantic, for isn't there romance wherever there is wealth?
The people whose wealth is such that they can take as their own
background all the beautiful accessories of aristocratic tradition, are
entitled to them if they like them well enough to spend their money in
this way. And it is the peculiar gift of our age to recognise in
ourselves the heirs of the centuries of beautiful handicrafts, which
we close with our machines. They certainly are the heirs to any kind
of beauty who have the imagination to enjoy it. And the imagination
for past associations, who have this more than the Americans? We
believe in England that all Americans are rich, that they can buy
whatever they appreciate. So by the divine right of things going to
those who appreciate them, the rich American is now, even as Sargent
paints him, environed by old French and English things and their
associations. And in connection with the accessories in Sargent's
pictures, might we not ask the question whether it could not be
considered a test of the worth or worthlessness, from a point of
beauty, of any ornament or furniture whether it would survive
representation in a picture? How much modern stuff we should have to
sweep aside! And now that one thinks of it, modern pictures have
left modern furniture rather severely alone--the painters have not
been faithful to their brethren the makers of modern tables and
chairs. Who is more modern than Sargent--and I am trying to think
has he ever painted a modern room--that is, a room with modern
things in it? The rooms that the most modern people live in are
oddly enough the ones that are most old-fashioned, filled with
eighteenth-century things. This, to reflect upon, has arisen through
thinking about Sargent's interior paintings, which so very vividly and
accurately reflect the attitude of the modern world to its own time.
In that word modern, if we are not using it too often, we must seek
the nature of Sargent's painting, its spirit; it is the most
interesting thing in connection with painting to come as close as
possible to its spirit. And what a test before any work of art, to ask
whether it is worth a search for the incorporeal element; although in
vain, in spite of Walter Pater, does painting aspire "towards the
condition of music," since music is as ghostly as the ghosts that it
contains.
[Illustration: PLATE III.--ELLEN TERRY AS "LADY MACBETH"
(In the National Gallery, Millbank)
A portrait of Miss Ellen Terry purchased from the Sir Henry
Irving Sale at Christie's in 1907, and presented to the nation
by the late Sir Jos. Duveen, who also bequeathed a sum of money
for the erection of the Turner Room now being added to the
National Gallery at Millbank.]