SCULPTOR MEMBERS
Mr. Herbert Adams
Mr. Robert Aitken
Mr. Daniel Chester French
Mrs. Anna Hyatt Huntington
Miss Malvina Hoffman
Mr. Chester Beach
Mr. Frederick MacMonnies
Mrs. Evelyn B. Longman Batchelder
Mr. James E. Fraser
Mr. Lorado Taft
Mr. Sherry Fry
Mr. Edward McCartan
Mr. Cyrus E. Dallin
Mrs. Bessie Potter Vonnoh
Mr. Attilio Piccirilli
Miss Janet Scudder
Mrs. Laura Gardin Fraser
Mr. Albin Polasek
Miss Harriet W. Frishmuth
Mr. Mario Korbel
Mr. Mahonri Young
Mr. John Gregory
Mr. Victor Salvatore
Miss Renee Prahar
Mr. Gutzon Borglum
Mr. Paul Jennewein
Mr. R. Tait McKenzie
Mr. Edward Berge
Mrs. Lucy Perkins Ripley
Mrs. Anna Coleman Ladd
Mr. A. Phimister Proctor
Mr. Arthur Putnam
Mr. Henry K. Bush-Brown
Mrs. Edith Barretto Parsons
Mrs. Margaret French Cresson
Miss Grace Mott Johnson
An Appreciation
An Exhibition of the works of Mr. John Sargent is the most important event of the kind that could at this moment happen anywhere, as he is the foremost living painter in the world. So far as one can judge the work of a contemporary, one is justified in predicting immortality for these compositions. Sargent belongs among the great portrait painters of all time, his pictures revealing the mysterious but unmistakable stamp of genius. In fact, everything he does shows this quality, which makes his painting the envy of competitors, and the pride and glory of American art. He has no successful living rival, but is in a class by himself. So true is this, that if I were asked to name the greatest living American, I should unhesitatingly name John Singer Sargent.
This Exhibition is for the benefit of the Endowment Fund of the Painters and Sculptors Gallery Association, with which Mr. Sargent has from the beginning been in active cooperation.
William Lyon Phelps
“Masters of American Paintings”
Charles Caffin
Courtesy of Doubleday Page & Company, 1902
“John Singer Sargent has been a favored child of the Muses, and early reached a maturity for which others have to labour long and in the face of disappointments. He, however, has never had anything to unlearn. From the first he came under the influence of taste and style, the qualities which to this day distinguish his work.... With a facility that was partly a natural gift, partly the result of a steady acceptance of the problems presented, he proceeded to absorb his master—Carolus-Duran. Sargent absorbed his breadth of picturesque style, his refined pictorial sense, his sound and scientific method, not devoid of certain tricks of illusion and his piquant and persuasive modernity.... Later, Sargent visited Madrid, and came under the direct spell of Velasquez. The grand line he had learned while a boy, and from Carolus the seeing of colour as coloured light, the modelling in planes, the mysteries of sharp and vanishing outlines appearing and reappearing under the natural action of light, a realism of observation at once brilliant and refined, large and penetrating. Finally, from all these influences, Sargent has fashioned a method of his own.
“How shall one describe the method? It reveals the alertness and versatility of the American temperament. Nothing escapes his observation, up to a certain point at least; he is never tired of a fresh experiment; never repeats his compositions and schemes of colour, nor shows perfunctoriness or weariness of brush. In all his work there is a vivid meaningfulness; in his portraits, especially, an amazing suggestion of actuality. On the other hand, his virtuosity is largely French, reaching a perfection of assurance that the quick witted American is, for the most part, in too great a hurry to acquire; a patient perfection, not reliant upon mere impression or force of temperament. In the abounding resourcefulness of his method there is a mingling of audacity and conscientiousness; a facility so complete that the acts of perception and of execution seem identical, and an honesty that does not shrink from admitting that such and such a point was unattainable by him, or that to have obtained it would have disturbed the balance of the whole. Yet, this virtuosity, though it is French in character, is free of the French manner, as indeed of any mannerism. This skill of hand is at the service of a brilliant pictorial sense. Like a true painter, he sees a picture in everything he studies. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct aesthetic charm; grandiose in some, ravishingly elegant in others, delicately quaint in a few, but all of them variously characterized by grandeur of line, suppleness of arrangement, and fascinating surprise of detail; used with extraordinary originality, but always conformable to an instinctive sense of balance and rhythm.
“Sargent is not of the world in which he plays so conspicuous a part, but preserves an aloofness from it and studies it with the collectedness of an onlooker interested in the moving show and in its general trends of motive, but with an individual sympathy only occasionally elicited. Sargent has his grip upon the actual, and while in relation to the world and people about him he is almost a recluse, he has delighted his imagination with the seemings and shows of things and with their material significance.”
Modern Artists
Christian Brinton
Courtesy of Doubleday Page & Company—The Sun, 1908
“Beyond all question Sargent is the most conspicuous of living portrait painters. Before his eyes pass in continuous procession the world of art, science, and letters, the world financial, diplomatic, or military, and the world frankly social. To-day comes a savant, a captain of industry, or a slender, troubled child. Tomorrow it will be an insinuating Semetic Plutus; next week may bring some fresh-tinted Diana, radiant with vernal bloom. Everyone from poet to general, from duchess to dark-eyed dancer, finds place in this shifting throng....
“With the entrance of Sargent into the arena of art cherished conventions disappear in sorry discomfiture. With a dignity and a technical mastery which compel both respect and enthusiasm he tramples upon tradition whenever tradition stands in his way. It is useless to scan these canvases in the hope of finding various qualities which for centuries have been deemed the touchstone of portraiture. Contemplation and reflection are by no means the rule. That adjustment of diverse elements which makes for balanced composition is often lacking. That endearing love of tone for its own sake is frequently absent. The vigorous outline of Holbein, the rich sobriety of Titian, or the permeating magic of Leonardo find but faint echo in the work of this modern innovator. With almost disdainful independence he has declined to repeat the triumphs of the great forerunners. In place of their ideals he has substituted ideals which are resolutely his own. However you may regard his contribution, it is impossible not to recognize its insistent novelty. Once in possession of the underlying facts, there should be no trouble in reading aright the salient, positive art, this art which by turns persuades and repels. Yet one cannot divine just why these high-bred women are so animated, or why the soldiers and statesmen are so emphatic, without first peering beneath the exterior. Though Sargent may himself remain dexterously on the surface, the spectator cannot. It is not enough to watch this conjurer perform his trick; we must see how it is accomplished.
“So dazzled has the majority been by what is called the man’s cosmopolitanism that the real racial basis of his nature has been over-looked.... Sargent is American in his fundamental instincts. His adaptability and his very lack of marked bias bespeak the native complexity of his origin. It cannot for a moment be maintained that the French paint themselves as Sargent paints them, or the English either. His art is neither Gallic nor British, it is American, and the chief reason why it is so different from most Anglo-Saxon art is because it is so superior, not because it is unAmerican. In any case the sense of motion remains Sargent’s personal conquest, possibly, even, his chief contribution to portraiture.
“In Sargent’s portraits women are in the act of starting from their chairs and men are on the very point of speaking. Here is a dancer whose yellow skirt still swirls in elastic convolutions; there stands a painter lunging at the canvas with sensitively poised brush. All is restless, vivid, spontaneous. One and all these creatures vibrate with the nervous tension of the age. Other artists have given calm, or momentarily arrested motion. Sargent gives motion itself. With a technique facile as it is assertive this magician of the palette, this paganini of portraiture, has lured us into a new world, a world which we ourselves know well—perhaps too well—but a world hitherto undiscovered by painting.”
Art and Common Sense
By Royal Cortizzoz
Courtesy of Scribner & Son, 1913
“Sargent studying under the wing of Carolus-Duran, was in an atmosphere sympathetic to new ideas, but not at all inhospitable to old ones. While he emerged from his master’s studio a modern in the best sense of the term, it was with a vein of conservatism in him which has never disappeared. Of how many modern painters, endowed, as he has been, superabundant technical brilliance, could it be said that they have never exceeded a certain limit of audacity? I know of no canvas of his which could fairly be called sensational. One of the least conventional of painters, his art nevertheless remains adjusted to the tone and movement of the world in which he lives—surely a fine example of genius expressing its age.
“People complain that Sargent violates the secret recesses of human vanity, and brings hidden, because unlovely, traits out into the light of day; that his candor with the brush is startling, to say the least, and sometimes even perilous. He is accused not simply of painting his sitter, ‘wart and all,’ but of exaggerating the physical or moral disfigurement. If this is true there is something humorous in the spectacle, which is constantly being presented, of men and women running the risk.... Few of his sitters, seem, as we see them on the canvas, to have been passive in his hands. The electric currents of a duel are in the air. Character has thrown down its challenge, the painter has taken it up, and the result is a work in which character is fused with design, playing its part in the artistic unit as powerfully, and almost as vividly, as any one of the tangible facts of the portrait.
“In the light of the long procession of portraits which he has put to his credit, it seems to me that if there is a living painter in whose interpretations of character confidence can be placed, it is Sargent. His range is apparently unlimited. He has painted men and women in their prime and in their old age, and in whatever walk of life he has found them, he has apprehended them with the ‘seeing eye’ that is half the battle.... It is worth noticing that it is not his portraits of men, but in his portraits of women, who illustrate far more histrionically the nervous tension of the age, that Sargent has painted his most unconventional compositions. When his subject has permitted him to exchange nervousness for repose, with what felicity he has seized his opportunity! There is not in modern portraiture a more satisfactory study in dignity and noble stateliness than his ‘Mrs. Marquand.’ (Shown in this exhibition)
“Sargent is himself in his reading of character in his design, and in his style. To say this is not to forget his indebtedness, where style is concerned, to other painters, even, Carolus-Duran. I think there is something of Carolus-Duran in his mere cleverness which like so much that is fluent and self-possessed in modern craftsmanship, could have been developed in Paris and nowhere else. The broad slashing stroke of Hals has taught him something, it is fair to assume; and the influence of Velasquez in his work is sufficiently obvious. Yet there is not in all his painting the ghost of what it would be reasonable to call an imitative passage. He is no more a modern Hals or Velasquez than he is a modern Rembrandt or Botticelli, for he looks at life and art from a totally different point of view, not simply, or grandly, or tragically, or imaginatively, but with the detached intellectual curiosity of a man of the world.”
American Painting and Its Traditions
John Van Dyke
Courtesy of Scribner & Sons, 1919
“Sargent did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born to him, and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. Training started him right, but his great success is not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the remarkable content of his work.
“Sargent’s life has been the result of peculiar circumstances—fortunate circumstances some may think; unfortunate others may hold. At least they have been instrumental in bringing forth an accomplished painter whose art no one can fail to admire. That his work may be admired understandingly it is quite necessary to comprehend the personality of the artist—to understand his education, his associations, his artistic and social environments. For if the man himself is cosmopolitan his art is not less so. It is the perfection of world-style, the finality of method.
“If I apprehend Sargent rightly, such theory of art as he possesses is founded in observation. Some fifteen years ago, in Gibraltar, at the old Cecil Hotel, I was dining with him. That night, as a very unusual thing, Sargent talked about painting—talked of his own volition. He suggested his theory of art in a single sentence: ‘You see things that way’ (pointing slightly to the left) ‘and I see them this way’ (pointing slightly to the right). He seemed to think that would account for the variation or peculiarity of eye and mind, and with a manner of doing—a personal method—there was little more to art. Such a theory would place him in measured agreement with Henry James whose definition of art has been quoted many times: ‘Art is a point of view, and a genius a way of looking at things.’
“A painter who has been looking at human heads for many years sees more than the man who casually looks up to recognize an acquaintance on the street. I do not mean that he sees more ‘character’—that is more scholarship or conceit, or pride of purse or firmness of will or shrewdness of thought, but merely that he sees the physical conformation more completely than others do. Every one sooner or later moulds his own face. It becomes marked or set or shaped in response to continued methods of thinking and acting. When that face comes under the portrait painter’s eye, he does not see the scholar, the banker, the senator, the captain of industry; but he does see perhaps, certain depression of the cheek or lines about the eyes or mouth in contractions of the lips or protrusions of the brow or jaw that appeal to him strongly because they are cast in shadow or thrown up sharply in relief of light. These surface features he paints perhaps with more emphasis than they possess in the original because they appeal to him emphatically, and presently the peculiar look that indicates the character of the man appears. What the look may indicate, or what kind of phase of character may be read in or out of the look, the portrait-painter does not know or care. He paints what he sees and has as little discernment of a character as of a mind. He gives, perhaps, without knowing their meaning, certain protrusions and recessions of the surface before him and lets the result tell what it may. In the production of the portrait accurate observation is more than half the battle. If a painter sees and knows his subject thoroughly, he will have little trouble in telling what he sees and knows; and to say of Sargent that he observes rightly and records truly is to state the case in a sentence.”