Is it a fancy?--but I see a resemblance between the art of Sargent and
that in writing of Mr. Henry James. The same pleasure in nuances of
effect in detail, and the readiness to turn to the life at hand for
this. To enjoy Sargent is above all to appreciate the means by which he
obtains effect in detail, the economy of colour and of brush marks with
which he deceives the eye, and the quality of subtle colour in the
interpretation of minor phenomena. On the large scale, in the general
effect, the quality of his colour is sometimes uninviting. But when at
its best it takes the everyday colour of things as if it was colour,
without the hysterical exaggeration with which so much youthful
contemporary art attempts to cheat itself and other people. If Sargent's
admirers do not claim that he sees all the colour there is in things,
they claim for him that he sees colour and has the reverence for reality
which prevents a tawdry emphasis upon it for the sake of sweetness of
effect. And after the sweetmeat vagaries, which have followed in the
wake of Whistler, by those without that master's self-control, this is
refreshing.
Sargent's brush seems to trifle with things that are trifling, to
proceed thoughtfully in its approach to lips and eyes. In painting
accessories around his sitters there is the accommodation of touch to
the importance of the objects suggested, and nowadays, since interior
painting is the fashion--to suit the taste of a young man of genius
imposing his peculiar gift upon the time--there are many portraits where
the sitter is brought into line with an elaborate setting out of _objets
d'art_, the painter's pleasure in the treatment of these manifesting
itself sometimes at the sitter's expense. Translating everything by the
methods we have described, Sargent preserves throughout his pictures a
certain quality of paint. The impression of the characteristic surface
of any material is made within this quality, by the responsiveness of
his brush to the subtlest modification of effect which differentiates
between the nature of one surface and another, as they are influenced by
the light upon them at the moment. There are painters who do not
translate reality into paint in this way, but who have striven to
imitate the surface qualities of objects by varying, imitative ways of
applying their paint. Sargent is not this kind of realist.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--LADY ELCHO, MRS. ADEANE, AND LADY
TENNANT
(In the collection of the Hon. Percy Wyndham)
A portrait group of the daughters of the Hon. Percy Wyndham. In
the background is the famous portrait of Lady Wyndham, mother of
the Hon. Percy Wyndham, painted by the late G. F. Watts,
O.M.R.A.]
He is a realist in the sense that Goya, the great Spanish painter of
the eighteenth century, was one, for the Spaniard had just such an
eagerness to come closer to the sense of life than the close imitation
of its outside could bring him. Sargent is more polite, less impetuous,
but still it is life as it is, that quickens his brush and informs all
his virtuosity. His technique presents life vividly, but presents it to
us with a sense of accomplishment in art, the equivalent of the
accomplished art of living of the majority of his sitters. I am thinking
of a portrait of a lady, and she is turning the leaves of a book, and in
the lowered eyes, and the movement of the hand, there is more than
arrested movement, there is an expression of an attitude consciously
assumed which ordinarily would have been an unconscious one, and so
accurate is the painting, that the sitter is detected as it were in this
self-consciousness. In portraits of a ceremonial order, for people to
sit in a group with a pleasant indispensable air of naturalness, is of
course an affair on the artist's part of very thoughtful arrangement.
But while composition should not betray the affectation of natural
movement, movement must not be conveyed in a merely sensational,
snapshot manner. For the slightest reflection on this matter will betray
to us that in the latter pretension we are cheated, since we cannot fail
to remember that to complete the canvas the sitter must have recovered
the pose day after day, hour after hour, in the studio. Sargent's
instincts are so tuned to the appropriate, having the tact which itself
is art, that whilst in this kind of portraiture we do not question the
grouping or the movement of his sitters as unreal, we do not accept it
as quite natural. We instinctively know that in proportion as it is made
to look too natural it would be unreal, untrue to the conditions which
the painter's art actually encountered. Sargent, who permits nothing to
stand between him and nature, will not permit such an inartistic lie to
stand between us and the sincerity of his painting. He does not betray
us in his love of what is of the moment, by giving us sham of this kind
instead of the real thing.
At every point at which we take his art and examine it, the evidence all
points to one form of success. The sitters posing are really posing,
their action is not even made unnaturally real as we have shown, and in
the distances in the room round them, there is the reality of space
dividing them from things at the other end of the room. Reality, within
the confines of the particular truths to which his method is subject,
has been the evident intention all through his art. From this standpoint
it often compels admiration in cases where it would have to be withdrawn
were we substituting in our mind another ideal, examining his work, for
instance, only in the light of a sensitive colour beauty which the
painter has not put first and foremost. Some artists have embraced
reality only as it justified their imagination. If we look on Sargent's
art for anything inward except that which looks through the eyes and
determines the smile of his sitter, we shall find our sympathies break
down. Unnecessary perhaps to say this, yet it were as well to make quite
clear the light in which we should regard the work of an artist who has
wholly succeeded in self-expression, the only known form of success in
art.
In analysing some men's work, we wish above all to know them, to know
the mind that thus environs itself. With others it is their art which
tempts us to further and further knowledge of its truths while, as with
Shakespeare, the artist behind it becomes impersonal. Thus it is with
Sargent's art. It is true that if we wish to know an artist we can never
under any circumstances become more intimate with him than in his art,
whether we find him in it far away in remote valleys or at the centre of
fashionable life. And this though the dreamer may be a man of fashion
and the painter of society live a life retired.
Of Sargent's water-colours, much might be said. To some extent they
explain his oils, yet he seems to allow himself in them a greater
freedom, just as the medium itself is freer than that of oils--more
accidental, and the masters of this art control its propensity for
accidental effect as its very spirit, guiding it with skill to results
which baffle and perplex by the ingenuity with which they give illusion.
First, as last, a painter has to accept the fact that he conveys nothing
except by illusion; that he can never bring his easel so close to the
subject, or his materials to such minuteness of touch, that his art
becomes pure imitation; nor can he secure the adjustment of proportion
between a large subject and a small panel which would give in every case
such imitation. The supreme artist accepts the standpoint first instead
of last, and the greater his art becomes, the greater his power in its
mysterious control of effect.