“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)