Dancing has been a theme always appealing to artists because of its
rhythm, its grace in reality, its incarnation of femininity. It contains
all the inspiration for a painter in any one moment of movement. No two
things could be further removed from each other than Lancret's "La
Camargo Dansant" and Sargent's "Carmencita," yet some alliterative
resemblance in the name and some resemblance in the dancers' costumes
bring these two figures together in my mind--the one the fairy
artificial dancer, the princess of an unreal world, the other a vivid
sinuous presentment. With both painters the costume has interested them
as much almost as the figure, for the dress of a dancer, indeed the
dress of any woman, is in a Sargent picture a part of herself, nothing
mere dead matter, everything expressive, the brush having come at once
to the secret that no one material thing is more spiritual than another.
For ever Carmencita stands, waiting for the beginning of the music, just
as La Camargo is caught upon the wing of movement, seeming to revive the
music that was played for her and cheating us with a sense of a world
happier than it is. In Carmencita we have that living beauty from which,
after all, a dreamer must take every one of his dreams. It is Sargent's
wisdom to stand thus close to life. In the sense of this reality, and
the difficulty of approach to it with anything so constitutionally
artificial as a painter's colours, do we apprise the real nature of his
gifts. The roses on La Camargo's dress are artificial roses, but not
more artificial than her face and hands. This figure is only a little
nearer to nature than a china shepherdess, it is the fancy of a mind
cheating itself with unrealities as realities. Sargent himself has
painted artificial things, the rouge on lips, the powder on a face;
since it is natural for some folk to rouge, that is the nature which he
paints. Only an imaginative woman makes herself up. A painter with more
imagination than Sargent would enter into the spirit of her arts.
Sargent's betrayal of his fashionable sitters has frightened many, but
if anything it has increased his vogue; for above everything an
imaginative woman is curious to know what she looks like to others, and
a Sargent's portrait is intimate, unflattering, perfectly candid but
perfectly true as an answer to her question.
Everything on the stage is artificial; what will this art, that has had
of the reality of things all its strength and life, make of a purely
theatrical picture--Miss Ellen Terry in a famous part? The artificiality
of the stage always presents two aspects, that one in which we forget
its artificiality and that other in which we remember it. And this
latter, to my mind, is the aspect in which Sargent has painted this
picture, without, as it were, ever stepping over the footlights into the
world that only becomes real on the other side of them. But the
exactness of his interpretation beautifully explains the scene.
"Carnation Lily, Lily Rose" was painted in a garden by the Thames. Two
children are lighting up the Chinese lanterns, and in their light and
with flowers surrounding, Sargent sees for a moment life itself by
accident made idyllic. The picture is Japanese in its sense of
decoration, as if decoration and idyllic moments always went together.
It would almost seem so from the study of art, for without exception,
those painters who have been conscious of the ideal and idyllic element
in life, have always shown this through composition which, whilst
dealing with a real scene, has taken a little of the reality from it.
There must be an essentially musical element in the art which takes a
mood as well as a scene from nature, and brings us by way of real scenes
to that imaginative country which exists in every nature-lover's mind; a
country partly made up of the remembrance of other places which have
been like the place where he now stands.
Great tiger-lilies hang over the children. We almost expect in these
surroundings pierettes or fantastic lovers, but we are kept close to the
beauty of reality by the naturalism with which the children have been
painted. Not one touch is given as a concession to their fairy and
dramatic background, not one ribbon, nothing in the costume to enable
them to enter into the patterned world of art as part of a design. For
above everything the painter has wished to persuade us of life itself as
a picture, and not of his ability to make these children the motifs of
design. Their ordinariness irritates me personally, they do not seem
quite to belong to their fairy land, but I recognise that this
matter-of-factness peculiarly belongs to Sargent's art and am interested
in the attitude that takes beauty so matter-of-factly.