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