American Masters of Painting / Being Brief Appreciations of Some American Painters

by Charles H. Caffin

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND.

By John S. Sargent.

enthusiasm of the students, and eager to set himself to learn. With a facility that was partly a natural gift, partly the result of a steady acceptance of the problems presented, he proceeded to absorb the master; his breadth of picturesque style and refined pictorial sense, his sound and scientific method, not devoid of certain tricks of illusion and his piquant and persuasive modernity—the sum total of an art that was a modern Frenchman’s paraphrase of one of the biggest of the old masters, Velasquez. At twenty-three he painted a portrait of Carolus, which shows he had absorbed his master so thoroughly as to be unconscious of the incidentals of his method and to have grasped only the essentials with such complete assimilation, that what he produces is already his own. Later, he himself visited Madrid and came under the direct spell of Velasquez. The grand line he had learned while still 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, realism of observation at once brilliant and refined, large and penetrating; and all these qualities he found united in the subtly grandiose canvases of the great Spaniard. Finally, from all these influences, he has fashioned a method very much his own.

And how shall one describe this 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 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 its abounding resourcefulness 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 attained it would have disturbed the balance of the whole. And yet this virtuosity, though it is French in character, is free of the French manner, as indeed of any mannerism. For example, his English men and women, his English children especially, belong distinctly to English life. Though he may portray them in terms of Parisian technique, he never confuses the idioms, being far too keenly alive to the subtle differences of race.

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. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he sees the picture, the one which for the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth, rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct æsthetic charm; grandiose, for example, in the portrait of “Lady Elcho, Mrs. Arden, and Mrs. Tennant,” ravishingly elegant in the “Mrs. Meyer and Children,” delicately quaint in the “Beatrix,” and so on through a range of motives, each 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. And then, too, how tactful is the selection of pose, costume, and accessories! With what taste he creates environment for his conception of the subject!

It is, however, in regard to the conception of his subject that Sargent challenges criticism. How far does he render the character of the sitter? To say that his characterization is slap-dash and superficial is, surely, going too far. It was confuted by that exhibition of fifty portraits, which represented at least fifty distinct persons. Nor with that panorama of his art in one’s memory can one admit that he has no real sympathy with his sitters. Very possibly, however, it is not a personal sympathy, and for two reasons. He is a picture maker before he is a portraitist, and in portraiture has less interest in the individual than in the type which he or she represents. This latter particular is symptomatic, partly of the artist himself and partly of his times. He 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, as when he paints Georg Henschel, like himself, a musician. Again it is an affectation of the class from which most of his sitters, especially the ladies, are drawn to exhibit the studied unconviction so deliciously represented in Anthony Hope’s “Dolly Dialogues.” The elegant shallowness of so many of his portraits is true enough in a general way, and very likely in the individual case. There is another type, embodying the thinking-for-herself and the greater latitude of action of the modern woman. They are, to a certain extent, the product of an age of nerves, and in his portraits of them there is perceptible an equivalent restlessness of manner, a highly strung intention, almost a stringiness of nervous expression. Again, I can recall in the Boston exhibition two portraits of ladies whose esprit was of a kind that quiet folks would consider fast. Their cases also had been keenly diagnosed and met with the skill of an artist who did not care to extenuate, nor on the other hand had fallen under personal subjection to the physical attractiveness, but set down what he saw and surrounded it with the elegant atmosphere that was its salvation in real life. It is here that he compares to such advantage with a painter like Boldini. Sargent has instinctive refinement. It would be quite impossible for him to have any feelings toward his subjects other than those of a true gentleman; and, though he may represent in a lady a full flavour of the modern spirit, he never allows the modernity to exceed the limits of good taste. For the same reason Sargent’s pictures, though many of them have a restlessness of their own, seem quiet alongside Boldini’s. The latter makes a motive of nervous tenuosity, and his pictures, if seen frequently, become wiry in suggestion, and defeat their own purpose of being vibrative; but Sargent’s, controlled by a fine sobriety of feeling, another phase of his unfailing taste and tact, retain their suppleness. Their actuality is all the more convincing because it is not the motive, but an incident.

Yet, even so, this actuality is of a very different quality from that reached by the old masters. I have in mind an inevitable comparison, suggested by his portrait of Mr. Marquand in the Metropolitan Museum with one by Titian on the same wall and with a Franz Hals, a Velasquez, and a Rembrandt in an adjoining gallery. In all these latter there is a gravity of feeling that is not alone due to the subduing effects of time; while Sargent’s portrait, even apart from the sleek fatness of the brush work which age will mature, is the product of a habit of mind altogether different. It lacks the intimacy of the “Wife” of Franz Hals, the penetrating depth of the “Doge Grimani,” the quiet assurance of Velasquez’s “Don Carlos,” and the intense sympathy of the Rembrandt, though the last two are only moderate examples of the masters. Instead, it reveals a certain assertiveness in its assurance, an intensity of nervous force rather than of intellectual or sympathetic effort, a brilliant epitome rather than a profound study. It has not the permanence of feeling, either in its characterization or method; that suggestion of perennial, stable truth, which, so far as we can judge from the past, would insure it a place among the great old masters of the future. Among the masters we may feel certain that Sargent will be reckoned as having been one of the most conspicuous figures of his age; but his vogue will rise and dwindle according to the amount of interest felt for the time being in the age which he represented; it will scarcely have that inevitableness of conviction, which, when once recognized, must abide. If this forecast is correct, the reason is that Sargent, though raised above his time, scarcely reveals in his portraits elevation of mind; he has the clear eye of the philosopher without his depth and breadth of vision; he has possessed himself of his age, and the age has taken possession of him. He swims on its sea with strokes of magnificent assurance, but with a vision bounded by the little surface waves around him; he has not sat above upon the cliffs, quietly pondering its wider and grander movements.