In the Luxembourg, Paris.
A limitation! Yes, but what artist has not limited his endeavors! It is by not trying to do everything that occasionally one succeeds in doing something. And if in painting one chooses to be a recorder of facts rather than a concocter of fiction, why should we grieve! How very little Sargent can concoct anything, even composition, is apparent in his group-portraits of two or three people—the Misses Hunter, for an example. The pattern bothered him, he could not “arrange” the sitters satisfactorily, and, finally having crowded them into the canvas, he painted them as he saw them, with the result that they look crowded. The fresco at Boston is decorative, to be sure, by virtue of its coloring and gilding, but as a composition it will hardly pass muster. It is a curious gathering of jewel-like hues, but it can make small pretense to a satisfactory mural composition. Sargent has never demonstrated great ability in arrangement, and so far as the public knows has never tried for historical composition.
The portrait of the single figure is his greatest success. Placing it upon the canvas calls for no great imagination or change in the model; and the opportunity for good drawing—his strongest technical accomplishment perhaps—is present. How well he draws! His light is in no way remarkable; it lacks subtlety, mystery, and all that cookery of the brush whereby light and shade are distorted and made to suggest the existence of things unseen; but his drawing is so profound that at times it is almost uncanny. It is impossible to separate it from the swift handling of the surface, for he gets the underlying structure and the overlying texture with one and the same stroke. By a twist of the brush he may give drawing, texture, value, hue, all at once. In this respect—his wonderful facility with the brush—he is in the class with Rubens.
It is this latter feature of his work that excites the greatest admiration of his fellow artists. The final result of his handling is to give one the impression of work done easily, in fact, rather improvised than premeditated. But the impression is somewhat misleading. Every stroke is calmly calculated, every touch is coolly designed. If the effect looks labored, the palette-knife is used to clean the canvas and the work is done over again. Infinite pains are taken that infinite pains shall not appear. There is no excitement or feverish haste, however swift the brush may seem to travel. The nimble hand obeys a well-trained mind, and if the work is easily and accurately done, it is not through any burst of inspiration or preternatural facility of the moment, but through long and careful training.
Least of all is there any trickery about it. The painting is just plain painting with ordinary canvases, brushes, and pigments squeezed out of lead tubes. It is the simplest and most direct kind of brushing. Sargent has never been led astray by any of the technical phases or crazes. His method of handling is perhaps Parisian though it harks back to Hals, Velasquez, Goya, Tiepolo, without exactly resembling any one of them. In its fluid quality perhaps it has more affinity with the work of Rubens, though again there is no positive resemblance. It is Sargent’s own way of expressing himself.
That there are defects attending this quality of expressiveness will not be denied, but they are comparatively unimportant. In the simple spreading of wet liquid paint certain results of depth or hue or texture are likely to be sacrificed. Often a profound shadow depth is produced by repeated glazings; thumbing and kneading of pigments on the canvas frequently result in a quality of color that cannot be directly spread with a brush; and, again, there are peculiar effects produced by underbasing that are not obtainable by surface manipulation. Kenyon Cox thinks that Sargent perhaps loses somewhat in textures by his direct method and cites as illustration his flesh painting.
“The sweeps of opaque color laid on with a full brush are apt to give a texture as of drapery, no matter how accurate the particular tints may be; and if we are to have the pleasure of instantaneous execution, we must generally accept it with some diminution of the pleasure derivable from beautiful flesh painting.... Indeed, it may be said that the highest beauty of coloring is always more or less incompatible with too great frankness of procedure and demands a certain reticence and mystery.”[18]
[18] Ibid.
There may be, probably is, considerable truth in that statement though I cannot for the moment get away from Rubens—one of the most direct painters in all art and yet a great colorist and a splendid painter of textures, especially the texture of flesh. Sargent is no such colorist as Rubens, but the lack is perhaps inherent in the man rather than in the method. At the same time Mr. Cox is right in degree. Perhaps the most engaging quality of flesh coloring, to return to the illustration, can be obtained only by additions and overlayings of paint which give the feeling of the coloring coming up from below to the surface. The direct method will not answer save in the hands of a Rubens.
But the end justifies the means with Sargent. Precision in drawing immediately begins to evaporate when one starts to knead or overlay the surface; and to weaken Sargent’s accuracy in drawing would be to imperil his authority and dispel such a thing as conviction. One cannot imagine it. If he should now deliberately try for subtlety or depth of color or seek to obtain a mysterious or illusory or enamelled surface, his friends in art would immediately declare him in decline and roll their eyes heavenward in despair. But fortunately there is no immediate prospect of such a thing. The painter’s inclination seems well settled, and neither his eye nor his hand has lost its cunning. On the contrary, since he practically abandoned portrait-painting more than a dozen years ago and turned his attention to landscape and effects of direct sunlight, he has been producing the most astonishing pictures of his career. The things that he sees and draws would have been thought as wild as cubist fancies thirty years ago. And yet they are the most positive pronouncements of elemental truths that he has yet put forth.