No one has encountered the beauty of woman's face more casually than
Sargent, no one has made us realise more fully its significance as a
fact in the world. After all we had thought perhaps we were partly
deceived in this matter by the illusions of poets and love-sick
painters, but approaching it without ecstasy, art has not been closer to
this beauty than here. I am looking at a half-tone reproduction of a
lady by Sargent, wondering whether in the history of English portrait
painting an artist has approached as closely to the thoughts of his
sitter. The expression of the face is determined partly by thoughts
within, partly by light without. And it is as if with the touch of a
brush a thought could be intercepted as it passed the lips. This is the
nearest approach that thought has ever had to material definition.
Thought is the architect of her expression, by accuracy of painting it
is copied, just as the back of a fan or bracelet is copied--things so
material as that. So after all thoughts are not so far away from the
material world with which we are in touch; are scarcely less visible
than air. The impressionists have rendered air; and would it be too
far-fetched to hint that the shadow on the lips almost serves to bridge
one province with another, the atmosphere without and that which reigns
within the sitter's mind. It is when Sargent's brush hesitates at the
lips and eyes, at the threshold of intimate revelation, that we really
begin to form an adequate conception of his genius. Yes, of things
fleeting, a thought flitting across the face, interrupted gestures--and
the mysterious suggestion of conversation hanging fire between the
sitter and ourself, Sargent is the master. Sometimes a portrait painter
will create a face on canvas, of pleasant expression, which is not like
his sitter, and it is as if with every touch he could change the
thoughts as he changes the expression in the face he is creating.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON, ESQ.
(In the collection of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)
A portrait of the writer of the children's play "Pinkie and the
Fairies" and many charming children's books illustrated by their
author, himself an artist of high attainment.]
Sargent's accuracy is such that the expression that passes over the face
in his portraits is one which all the sitter's friends recognise; so
close is he in touch with the delicate drawing, especially round the
lips, that his brush never strays by one little bit into the realm of
invention. There are other painters painting as carefully, faces as full
of expression, who do not come near a likeness of their sitter. In what
provinces close to nature are they wandering, since, striving to paint
the face before them, they paint another face? We must not forget, in
thinking of Sargent's greatness, that he unfailingly is in close touch
with his sitters' expression, that is, almost with their thoughts.
Although Sargent has proved in many landscapes his powers in that
direction, he too well enters into the spirit of the portraiture to
which he has put his hand to attempt to introduce naturalistic effects
into backgrounds obviously painted in a London studio. The landscape
background is sometimes charming if under these circumstances it remains
a convention; for there are moments when nature herself is out of place,
pictures in which human nature must be the only form of life,--with the
exception perhaps of flowers, for these accompany human nature always,
to revelries where sunlight is excluded, and even to the tomb. It is art
of little carrying power that is exhausted upon some transcript of
beautiful detail, colour of the glazes of a vase, a bunch of flowers.
Sargent embraces difficulties one after another with energy unexpended.
Physique, but never genius will give out. Energy of this order always
goes with a generous, because very human, outlook; success on occasion
being modified not through failure to accomplish, but through failure to
respond.
V
The life of a busy portrait painter, with its demand for inspiration
every morning, is of the most exacting nature, and the quality of the
painter's output must of necessity vary. The nervous strain is great,
for sitters are capricious, and always is the temptation present to the
one sin that is unforgivable, compromise with the Philistine--the
concession of genius to stupidity, of perceptions nearly divine to
ignorance. Genius has always had difficulty in working to order, yet
nearly all the great portraiture work in the world has been done to
order. But one imagines that the conditions under which the masterpieces
of a modern painter, with so great a vogue as Sargent's, have been
produced must be unparalleled by anything in the history of ancient
painting. A crowd streamed through the studios of Gainsborough,
Reynolds, and Romney to be painted, but the world was smaller then, and
their art was more easily done. They worked within a convention narrower
than Sargent's, compromising with nature at the very start; a convention
more beautiful than his, a garden, beautiful because it was confined and
seen in an accustomed light. If things are beautiful at all they become
more so when they are no longer unaccustomed, when they fit in with an
old frame of mind. Sargent deals with the unaccustomed--in which at
first perhaps we always see the ugly--whilst, as we have said, he does
not destroy, as the vandalistic art of some painters does, the
connection between the past and present. It is the present which his art
embraces, but we might almost say we are never thoroughly accustomed to
the present until it has become the past. So to us Sargent's art is not
as beautiful as Gainsborough's, for it has constantly to throw over some
old form of perfection to embrace a new difficulty. In the eighteenth
century there was less variety in the life which art encountered. The
life of even a Gainsborough or a Reynolds would be circumscribed in just
the same way that their art is circumscribed, uninterrupted in its mood,
and beauty is to be found in uninterrupted moods.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--CARNATION LILY, LILY ROSE
(In the National Gallery, Millbank)
This painting was bought for the nation under the terms of the
Chantrey Bequest in 1887, seven years previous to the painter's
election to associateship of the Royal Academy.]