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

by Charles H. Caffin

So the intimacy revealed in the great majority of Sargent’s portraits is of that degree and quality which passes for intimacy in the polite society of to-day—a conformability to certain types of manner and feeling, with interesting little accents of individuality, that shall distinguish without too keenly differentiating; traits of style rather than of personality. Sometimes there is even less than this. The subject would seem to have got upon the artist’s nerves, interfering with the usual poise of his study, so that he seems to have allowed himself to be sidetracked on to some loopline of the temperament. Occasionally he touches a deeper level of intimacy, as in the portraits of Henschel, Mr. Penrose, and Mr. Marquand, and oftentimes in children’s portraits, notably in that of Homer St. Gaudens. But for the most part, I believe, it is not the personality of the sitter that attracts us so much as that of the artist, which he has seized upon the occasion to present to us; a personality of inexhaustible facets and of a variety of expression that, for the time being at least, creates an illusion of being all-sufficient.

What a contrast he presents to Whistler, with whom he shares the honour of being among the very few distinctly notable painters of the present day! Sargent with his grip upon the actual, Whistler in his search for the supersensitive significance, are the direct antipodes in motive. Each started with a justifiable consciousness of superiority to the average taste of his times; but while Whistler, on one side of his character a man of the world, has in his art withdrawn himself into a secluded region of poetry, Sargent, almost a recluse, has delighted his imagination with the seemings and shows of things and with their material significance.

Is the reason for this merely that success claimed him early and that he has not been able to extricate himself from the golden entanglement, or that deeper one, noticeable in many artists, that their artistic personality is the direct antithesis of that personality by which they are commonly known to the world? Otherwise, this man with his gift of seeing pictures, with his power of a brush that seems loaded with light rather than with pigment, with his smiting force or tender suggestiveness of expression—what might he not have done had he followed the bent of his mind, a mind stored with culture, serene and reflective? Something, doubtless, less dazzling than his portraits, but more poetical, more mysteriously suggestive, more distinctly creative. As it is, some little studies of Venice, such as “Venetian Bead Stringers,” come nearer probably to the true spirit of Sargent; to that exquisiteness of fancy which he developed more completely in the study of children lighting lanterns in a garden, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.” The refined originality of this embroidery of light and shadow, the lights so brilliant, the shadows penetrated with mystery, the affectionate tenderness with which the children and flowers are represented, the lovely imaginativeness of the whole conception, bespoke qualities which have appeared only partially in the portraits, and are altogether of a rarer significance than their vivid actuality. This picture is perhaps even more acceptable than his elaborate decorations in the Boston Public Library, because it represents more unreservedly an artist’s vision and one of such delicate apprehensiveness. The decorations involve a more laboured, conscious effort to produce something noble, and the literary allusion encroaches somewhat upon the æsthetic. Yet to enjoy them we are not bound to thread our way through the maze of mythological suggestion. The panels are full of dignity and beauty, considered purely as decoration; finely rhythmical in the frieze, stern with tensity of form and deliberate harshness of colour in the lunette, a labyrinth of tapestried ornament in the soffit of the arch.

Their significance, both as decoration and allusion, is progressive, passing from the serene simplicity and tempered realism of the prophets, through the mingling of human tragedy and symbolism in the misery of the apostate Jews, up to the bewilderment of beauty and horror in the representation of the tangle of false faiths. Moreover, this graduation of motive bears a very skilfully adjusted relation to the architectural function of the several spaces embellished. Unfortunately the room itself has very little architectural reasonableness, and is unworthy of the decorations, which will not establish their full dignity of effect until the remaining spaces are filled. So it is scarcely fair to compare them with Puvis de Chavannes’s in the same building, which involve a completed scheme, for which, too, the architects made due provision. Further, the motives of the two artists are so radically different: Puvis, content to shadow forth a vague conception in abstract terms; Sargent, seeking to embody the facts of men’s mental and moral life in their direct and actual significance. It was a more daring problem, and one that perhaps is more closely knitted to the feeling of our times. The solution is a most notable attempt to bring the intellectual faculties into harmonious accord with the æsthetic.

It is along the line of these decorations and of “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” that one believes the true Sargent may be discerned. In them he is giving utterance to himself; in his portraits responding with a certain hauteur to the allurements of his day.

V
WINSLOW HOMER

IN the American section at the recent Paris Exposition, no painter made a more distinct mark than Winslow Homer. The foreign critics seemed to be conscious of a fresh note in his pictures: one not traceable to European influences, still less suggestive of Parisian technique; a note of unmistakable force and independence. Could it be considered representatively American?

Almost for the first time this question appeared to be asked with a real interest in the answer. Foreigners had long been acquainted with painters from America, who came over in increasing numbers, and showed a remarkable faculty of quickly assimilating the teaching and influences of Europe. But were there any distinctively American painters? Those students who remained in Europe, though many of them were individual and forceful men, merged themselves more or less completely in their new environment. What, then, became of those who returned to America? Presumably they carried back with them the Europeanisms they had acquired. So far as could be judged from the showing made by American painters at previous expositions, they were but reflecting the influences of Paris or of German and English painting. Was there, in fact, as distinguished from art in America, any American art? And with a languid interest in a matter so far detached from their personal knowledge, the foreigners had answered the question for themselves, negatively. However, the Exposition of 1900 contained an American section which revealed a great deal of motive and character that could not be lightly dismissed as but a reflex of Europe. It might have been made even more representative of the difference which the American environment is steadily impressing upon the work of Americans who live and paint at home; but notwithstanding its shortcomings in this respect, the exhibition undoubtedly gave evidence that such difference already existed. The evidence was largely of the circumstantial kind, to be gathered not from any patent fact so much as from a collating of various hints of motive and character, and from a comparison of them with those exhibited in the pictures of other countries.