JOHN SINGER SARGENT

Monograph Number Five in The Mentor Reading Course

John Singer Sargent has been called the most “modern of moderns, one of the most dazzling men of talent of the present day.”

Sargent is in reality an American only by parentage; for he was born at Florence, Italy, on January 12, 1858, and since 1884 has lived in London. Sargent’s father was Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, a distinguished Boston physician. Sargent as a child was very sensitive, and was greatly influenced by the art treasures of his birthplace. He received his early education in Italy and Germany, and his impressionable nature amid such surroundings was shaped by the atmosphere of the famous Tuscan city, which left its refining mark upon all his work. The parents of many artists of genius have attempted to dissuade their sons from becoming painters. On the contrary, however, Sargent’s parents encouraged him to draw from the canvases of Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto.

In 1874, when Sargent was only eighteen, he went to Paris to study, entering the atelier of Carolus-Duran. A portrait of his teacher painted toward the close of his studentship won the commendation of the best judges. He received an honorable mention in the Salon in 1878, and in 1881 a second-class medal for his “Portrait of a Young Lady,” which has been made famous by the appreciation of Henry James, the distinguished American novelist. As an artist with a future he turned his steps to Spain. In Madrid he studied the canvases of Velasquez carefully, and this master has influenced his entire art career. He seemed to come so close to this great painter that he was enabled to bring into the nineteenth century the power of the most modern of fifteenth century painters.

Sargent returned to Paris in 1882 and exhibited “El Jaleo,” a picture representing a Spanish woman dancing, which attracted a great deal of attention, and is now in the Boston Art Museum. Soon afterward Sargent drifted to London, and in 1886 his “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” brought him immediate recognition. He rapidly became known in London as a brilliant portrait painter, and year by year his Academy portraits were the features of the exhibitions. His success was now assured, and his sitters included the men and women of greatest distinction in the literary, artistic, and social life of both Europe and America.

He is best known as a portrait painter; but at the same time he has done much excellent decorative work, and his decorations for the Boston Public Library, “The Pageant of Religion,” among which was the frieze of “The Prophets,” which were completed in 1903, placed him among the leading mural painters of America.

Sargent was elected a member of the Royal Academy in London in 1894, and in addition to this he has won many other honors. And unlike many American artists residing in Europe, he has always retained his directness and independence.

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 2, No. 15. SERIAL No. 67
COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION. INC.

Copyright 1907 by DeW C. Ward.

THE BENEFICENCE OF THE LAW by Kenyon Cox. In the Essex County Courthouse, Newark, New Jersey.

American Mural Painters
KENYON COX

Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course

Not only has Kenyon Cox placed himself in the front rank of American artists through his paintings, but he has also made a name for himself as an art critic.

He was born at Warren, Ohio, on October 27, 1856. His father was General Jacob Dolson Cox. He studied art when quite young, first at Cincinnati and Philadelphia, and then at the age of twenty-one went to Paris to study. There for five years he was under Carolus-Duran and Gérôme.

In 1882 he returned to New York and opened a studio there. Shortly after this he began teaching in the Art Students’ League, and had much success in that line. In 1892 he married Louise Howland King, who is well known as a painter herself.

The earlier work of Cox consisted mostly of the nude. He received little encouragement for these pictures, however, and turned to mural decoration, in which he has achieved prominence. His first step toward mural work was the painting of two decorations for the Library of Congress at Washington. In two tympanums (the flat, triangular part of a pediment) each thirty-four feet in length, he has painted the Arts and the Sciences. Among his better known examples are the frieze for the courtroom of the Appellate Court, New York City, and the decorations for the Walker Art Gallery at Bowdoin College, for the Capitol at St. Paul, Minnesota, and for other public and private buildings. His decoration, “The Beneficence of the Law,” in the Essex County Courthouse at Newark, New Jersey, is one of his best-known paintings.

Of late years Mr. Cox has spent much time on wall decorations. He is a maker of pictures and a master of line; but is not an interpreter of life nor an exploiter of ideas.

He is the author of a number of books on art, among which are “Old Masters and New,” and “Painters and Sculptors,” in addition to some poems. He was elected to the National Academy in 1903, and has received many medals and honors.

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR, VOL. 2, No. 15. SERIAL No. 67
COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION. INC.

Copyright, by Hotel Imperial

Bowling on the Green, by E. A. Abbey. In the grill of the Hotel Imperial, New York City

AMERICAN
MURAL PAINTERS

By ARTHUR HOEBER

Author, Artist, and Critic

THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS · SEPT. 15, 1914

MENTOR GRAVURES

DAWN, by T. W. Dewing

Ceiling decoration in the grill of the Hotel Imperial, New York City

“Oh, tenderly the haughty day

Fills his blue urn with fire!”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The story of mural painting in America dates back just a trifle over half a century; yet so rapidly do we develop things in this country that today the names of half a hundred men and women who have done distinguished work in this direction come to mind in any review of native accomplishment. However, the art of decoration is one of the oldest in the history of the world, examples of which have been handed down from almost prehistoric times. Traditions reach us—examples too—from the great civilizations of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, in Europe; while on our own continent there remain records of art in the way of wall decorations in Mexico and Central America, of beauty, taste, and invention, that baffle all efforts to classify as to their age. Says a great art writer, “No society, however rudimentary, has altogether ignored art.” Within the last few years prehistoric paintings by men who probably lived on reindeer flesh have been discovered in caves of the Pyrenees, paintings of no little artistic merit and surely artistic instinct.

With the name of John La Farge must begin any account of the history of mural painting in America. The name is an honored one in the annals of our art development, and he has been dead only a few years, after a long life of devotion to high artistic ideals. It was in 1861 that he completed a panel for the church of the Paulist Fathers, in New York. The theme was “Saint Paul Preaching at Athens.” The architects, however, rejected the work for reasons that seem never to have been recorded, and the next year La Farge began a large triptych[1] of “The Crucifixion”; though he completed only two of the smaller divisions of the composition. These he kept in his studio for many years, until they were purchased by the late William C. Whitney. But his work in the meantime had been remarked, and he received an order for some decorations for a dining room; while the architect H. H. Richardson, in 1876, offered him a commission to take charge of the interior decoration of Trinity Church, Boston. This work was completed in about four months. La Farge chose as assistants Francis Lathrop, Francis D. Millet, George W. Maynard, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens the sculptor, among others. The work was satisfactorily completed, and remains today one of the great accomplishments in this country. After this La Farge was asked to decorate Saint Thomas’ Church in New York, which was followed by his decorations for the Church of the Incarnation in the same city.

[1] A picture on three panels side by side.

Copyright, 1904

THE EDICT OF TOLERATION, by E. H. Blashfield

This is the central section of a decoration in the courthouse at Baltimore, Maryland

THE LIGHT OF LEARNING

By Kenyon Cox

Lunette in the public library at Winona, Minnesota