American painting and its tradition

by John C. Van Dyke

JOHN S. SARGENT

The major events in Mr. Sargent’s life as we read them or hear them told to-day seem in no way striking or startling. He has moved along well-trodden paths, in a well-ordered career, responsive always to the teaching of his youth, and reflective of his social and intellectual surroundings. He did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born to him and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. He came to it early, grew up in its atmosphere, and was under its spell at an impressionable age. Which is to say that he is not a self-made painter in the Inness-Wyant sense, but something of a traditional painter in the La Farge sense. Training started him aright, but his great success is, of course, not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the remarkable content of his work.

He was born in Florence in 1856. His parents were Americans residing in Italy at the time of his birth. The father was from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had studied medicine in Philadelphia, afterward remaining in the latter city to practise his profession. He had met and married a Miss Singer of an old Philadelphia family, and later they had gone to Florence to live. Legally, therefore, the painter is an American, but the legal tie is about all that binds him to us. We like to claim him because he is a celebrity, but in reality he is an American only in a nominal way. He was not reared or educated here, he has not lived here, he has not fought in our quarrels or failed in our failures or succeeded in our successes. The greater part of his life has been passed abroad amid other scenes and other peoples. As a boy he travelled about Europe with his parents, speaking German as his first acquired language, if I report him aright, and gaining the bulk of his schooling in Italy and Germany. At eighteen he went to Paris and entered the atelier of Carolus Duran—at that time perhaps the most famous of the French portrait-painters. It was not until 1876, when Sargent was twenty years old, that he saw the shores of the United States. That was his first visit. He did not stay for any length of time, and what were his impressions of the land and the people we do not know. Several times since then he has been here for short periods, but one or another of the large European capitals has been his residence. Since 1884 his permanent abiding-place has been London, though he lived for a time in Paris, and just now (1918) he is again here in America.

It would seem then that however much pride we may take in Sargent’s achievements we can hardly be proud because he is peculiarly our own. He is not American in the sense of knowing the land and the people and reflecting our life and civilization. Just as little has his birth in Italy made him Italian or his residence in France and England made him French or English. No country can claim him, no people can appropriate him, for in reality he is a citizen of the world at large—the manner of man we sometimes call a cosmopolite. If there is one place above another that he can be traced to and said to emanate from it is Paris; and Paris is no longer merely the first city of France. It, too, has become cosmopolitan—the centre of modern life and the gathering-place of the world’s knowledge, intelligence, and fashion. Sargent reflects its taste and its skill, but not anything else that is peculiarly French, not anything that smacks of the French soil. The accomplishments of Paris are his, but without the sentiment or the feeling that is French.

It is questionable if a man who is equally at home in London, Paris, Florence, and New York will or can have a very strong sentiment about any one of those places. He can hardly spend a winter in the United States and become vitally interested in democracy, and the next winter go to England and fall deeply in love with aristocracy. Nor can he live for a few months in Spain or Germany and penetrate to the quick the life and character of its people. The cosmopolite who moves hither and yon about the globe hardly ever takes to heart the affairs and interests of those with whom he is temporarily sojourning. On the contrary, it is rather his attitude of mind that nothing is to be taken too seriously. To ruffle one’s composure with an emotion or to worry one’s self about a sentiment is the very thing he seeks to avoid. He accepts the facts as facts, concerns himself with the appearance of things, is a stickler for the refinements, and a great student of manners, methods, and styles. He quickly absorbs whatsoever is artistic or intelligent or learned, his perceptions are very acute, his knowledge and manner are polished to the last degree; but the strong feeling that, after all, lies at the bottom of great endeavor finds no utterance in his work, and the national beliefs that are really the insistent and persistent things in both literature and art are not the mainspring of his action.

So much may be said in a general way about the painter we are considering; and so much without a thought of either praise or blame. Mr. Sargent’s life has been the result of peculiar circumstances—fortunate circumstances some may think, or perhaps unfortunate, as 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. It is learned to an extraordinary degree, accurate, scientific, almost faultless; but it belongs to no country, reflects no people, discloses no sentiment, and causes no emotion. It is calmly intellectual and begets enthusiasm only for its absolute truthfulness to appearance and the brilliant facility of its achievement.

To behold and to accomplish—that is to see and to paint—seem to have been Sargent’s ambition from the start. What gave his original impetus toward art is not disclosed, but his mother was a clever person with water-colors, and she may have prompted his interest in painting. At any rate, he early became proficient in drawing. As a boy, sketching in the Tyrol, Leighton saw his work and remarked its skill. Later on he was entered as a pupil in the schools of the Florence Academy. Travelling at vacation times with his parents he saw many pictures and doubtless studied the old masters from many angles. Everywhere among the Renaissance painters he must have remarked the skilled craftsman, and perhaps his early aspirations were to excel as they had excelled. Certainly it was with no little knowledge of drawing that he presented himself at the Paris atelier of Carolus Duran in 1874, aged eighteen.

Carroll Beckwith, one of the earliest and best-loved of the pupils in the atelier and a life-long friend of Sargent, has often told me the story of Sargent’s arrival. He came with his father, and when Beckwith opened the door he found a refined-looking gentleman and a tall, thin son standing there. Beckwith, as the massier of the class, presented the pair to the master. The portfolio of sketches, which Sargent had under his arm, was presently examined, with the class forming an admiring half-circle at the back. It is reported that Carolus observed that the nouveau had much to unlearn, but Beckwith says the class was astonished at the pencil-drawings and the facility of the water-colors. The nouveau was accepted by the master and was a marked success from the start.

Carolus was a good teacher after his kind and impressed his method upon Sargent, who accepted and bettered it. The method in brief did not start with the carefully prepared sketch of Ingres or even a charcoal-drawing upon the canvas, but a full brush of color laid on in mass. Pupils were to draw, model, paint at one and the same time. In blocking in a figure the paint might be thick and the edges at first sharp, but the values, the tone, the properly constructed body were to be absolute. Underlying structure was a necessity. Sargent learned that early in his career and never forgot it. His brush-work has been thought his greatest technical feature, but that of itself would be for nothing holden did it not by its certainty produce absolute drawing. He has always been a consummate draftsman.

Yet it was Carolus who taught facility and ease with the brush and preached Velasquez to his pupils. No doubt the master saw great qualities in the Spaniard where his pupils saw only great dexterity, but at any rate their attention was called to the fact that a picture may be made interesting in its surface and be the better therefor. Sargent was a quick convert to this idea, and he very soon developed a breadth and truth of brush-work that astonished his master and set Paris talking. All his life it has been one of the pronounced features of his technique, and yet not a feature by which his art stands or falls. One of his latest portraits—that of Henry James—does not noticeably show it. The surface is almost smooth so inconspicuous is the brushing, and yet there are few who will not count the James as one of the best considered, cleanest cut, and most profound of Sargent’s portraits.