Part 3

For his faith at root is a very simple one: the love of beauty and the expression of it; only beauty with him is one of essence and significance, quite removed from any literary allusiveness, and as far as possible expressed by means which are solely the products of brush or etching needle, sensation and method approximating as much as may be to the exclusively abstract ones of music. He cannot escape the concrete altogether and must often use as vehicles of expression things to which the dictionary assigns terms, and to which the association of memory and ideas has given a verbal significance. But even in using these he feels such significance extraneous, and subordinates it as far as possible to the special æsthetic significance of the pictorial art. It is the meaning that these things have for the artist’s peculiar vision that he tries to keep free from other allusion--abstract. It is not the object before him for the time being that is worth his consideration, but the enjoyment of the purely æsthetic impression of it aroused in his own mind, of which he seeks to express the essence in his picture. It is a theory of art all but too subtle for human nature’s daily food; in a world in which we are continually confusing cause and effect, the object with the subject, the source of our enjoyment with the enjoyment itself; a theory quite intolerable when exploited by a mediocre painter, or by a facile painter of mediocre mind; only, perhaps, so acceptable in Whistler’s case, because it is essentially a product of his own unique originality.

It was his craving for abstract expression as well as for abstract sensation that led to his symphonies; and the storm of abuse and ridicule which they aroused gave him, no doubt, a keener relish for such studies. It would be too much to say that any of them were done deliberately to mystify the public; but that he found a sly relish in the mystification is most probable, and one may believe that some of these, to him only experiments in the record of impressions, were exhibited with the Satanic purpose of infuriating a public, so enamoured of the “finished picture.” Today, however, these studies are applauded, and Whistler is probably as contemptuous of the undiscriminating approval as of the indiscriminate abuse. For really their vogue is as open to suspicion as would be a vogue of Bach. In their lack of any graspable theme and in their delicately elaborated orchestration of tone they can be appreciated, priced, that is to say, at their proper worth, only by those whose sense of colour is very cultivated; nor even, perhaps, by all of them, for these impressions are so personal to their author that they must always mean more and otherwise to him than to others.

The vogue, therefore, may well make him sad, and sadness with Whistler takes the form of contempt. It is the distortion of his character or the bias to its flaws produced by opposition. Conviction has stiffened into arrogance, individuality become deflected toward an attitude of pose. These blemishes are absent from his work, which is always serene and lovable; they are merely incidental to the man and should not enter into an appreciation of his art, except that he has himself forced a recognition of them even upon his admirers. It is this aspect of him which Boldini has thrust upon the world in his well-known portrait. I have always resented it, for it is founded only on partial fact, suppressing the better facts and smacking too much of Boldini himself and of the pruriency of suggestion, with which he has invested so many portraits. The Whistler that we see in this picture, sitting sideways on a chair, his elbow on the back of it and his long fingers thrust through the snaky black hair, represents the last word in modernity; thrilling with nervous vibration, keyed to snapping intensity; a creation of brilliant egoism, quivering on the edge of insanity; the quintessence of refined callousness and subtlety. How much truer to the man and the artist is Rajon’s portrait; nimbly impressionable, clever and elegant, the lurking devil in

the eye and touch of cynicism on the lip not enough to disguise an underlying sweetness and freshness of mind. The other, in its half-truth, is a travesty; this one, very expressive of the mingled qualities of this remarkable man.

For none but a man of peculiar sweetness of mind could have conceived that masterpiece in the Luxembourg, “The Portrait of My Mother.” Garbed in black, as you will remember, she sits in profile, with her feet upon a footstool and her hands laid peacefully and elegantly on her lap; the lawn and lace of her cap delicately silhouetted against the gray wall. She gazes with tranquil intensity beyond the limit of our comprehension along the vista of memories, leading back through maternity to a beautiful youth. Nor is there any cynicism in “The White Girl,” that symphony in white, rejected at the Salon of 1863, when the artist was twenty-nine years old, but conspicuous in the _Salon des Refusés_. The girl stands mysteriously aloof from all contact with, or suggestion of, the world, her dark eyes staring with a troubled, wistful look, as if she had been surprised in her maiden meditation and were apprehensive of something she cannot fathom, and is too reliant upon herself to wholly fear. The picture is no brilliant epitome of shallowness, but an almost reverential conception, in exquisitely idealized degree, of the poetry of maidenhood, maturing normally. In both these pictures, which come as near as anything which Whistler has done to the generally accepted idea of a subject, it is the significance, in the one case of motherhood, in the other of maidenhood, that he has dwelt upon, and in both with the fullest reliance upon the æsthetic suggestion to the sense, respectively, of black and gray, and of white, elaborated to an extreme of subtlety. It would be impossible, I mean, that the colour schemes, for example, could be reversed; each is so intentionally and conclusively the language fitted to the idea, that one might as well try to put the words of Juliet into the mouth of Volumnia.

In pictures like “The Music Room,” there is a further step toward abstraction. So far as it represents the interior of a room with walls of ivory-white set off with dainty rose-sprigged curtains, in which a lady in black riding-habit stands by a marble mantelpiece, while a child in white frock sits a little farther back reading, it is a _genre_ picture of that sort that Alfred Stevens painted, done not for any particular significance in the figures, but for the opportunity which it yields of a delicate scheme of colour and exquisite adjustment of values, and for the pure enjoyment of representing the æsthetic significance of these qualities. But it is at once more subtle and more daring than Stevens could have wrought. It involves a problem, the very difficulty of which no doubt keyed the artist to enthusiasm, to keep the child in white behind the figure in black, and to make the latter a distinguished ornament in the picture, while still preserving its pliant relation to its light surroundings--a problem not improbably suggested, in part at least, by one of Outamaro’s prints, at any rate in its Caucasian transposition worthy to be compared with the work of the Japanese master. Nor is it only a problem in skill. Jet is beautiful in tone and texture, and so is ivory, and the combination of the two, set off with delicate accents of rose, creates a beauty of its own.

“Variations in Flesh and Green--The Balcony” may be selected as a still further advance toward abstract sensation and expression. These girls in kimonas, standing, sitting, and reclining on the edge of a river with a glimpse of factory chimneys across the water, mean nothing in a “subject” sense, and lack even the reasonableness of the figures in the previous picture. They are parts of a fantasy, pure and simple, to which they contribute impersonally; an artist’s dream of atmosphere and colour, which you will enjoy or not, according as you can enter into the abstract intention of the artist. Reaching the essence of beauty to a degree still less alloyed is such a picture as “Bognor--Nocturne”: blue smooth water with shadowy shapes of trawlers gliding like dusky phantoms, and of figures standing in the shallow surf; blue sky and atmosphere, penetrated with silvery luminousness. It is a scene of exquisite refreshment to the spirit, mysteriously etherealized, the artist being so absorbed with the spiritual presence of the summer night that his own soul echoes its very heart-beats.

Once again, then, in all these pictures, it is the essence or innermost significance of the theme that Whistler treats; itself a quality so immaterial that he shrinks from expressing even matter in too distinct or tangible a form, enveloping it in a shrouded light, representing it as a concord of coloured masses with a preference for delicate monotony of hues and soft accentuations, seeking by all means to spiritualize the material. And this without loss of stateliness; he has learned the dignity of the great line from Velasquez, and from him, too, the magisterial use of blacks and grays. Nor with the wild irrelevance of the visionary; there are piquancy and virility in all his pictures, not of lively colour and rampageous brush work, but attained through subtle surprises of detail and decorative originality--qualities gleaned from the Japanese. Again, in the trancelike intensity of Rossetti’s figures, he may have found a quality akin to his own spirituality of sentiment, just as his love of light and of delicate discrimination of values links his art to that of the impressionists. And out of these various influences, his own personality, irresistibly original, at once fanciful and penetrating, serene and nervous, permeated with the quintessence of sensuous refinement, he has fashioned for himself a language “faithful to the colouring of his own spirit,” in the strictest sense original and stamped with style--a style that is simple, earnest, grand.

And even closer precision of personal expression appears in Whistler’s etchings. For to one who seeks to render, not the facts, but his sense of the facts, etching offers greater freedom than painting. It is the art of all others which permits an artist to be recognized by what he _omits_, the one in which the means employed may be most pregnant of suggestion and in closest accord with the personal idiosyncrasy of the man. To Whistler, therefore, with his intense individuality, his discerning search for the significance of beauty and his instinct for simplicity and economy of means which will yet yield a full complexity of meaning, etching early became a cherished form of expression. In the “Little French Series” (1858), the “Thames Series” (1871), the “First Venice Series” (1880), and the “Second Venice Series” (1887), as well as in other plates etched in France, Holland, and Belgium, he has proved himself the greatest master of the needle since Rembrandt. Indeed, the eminent painter-etcher and connoisseur, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, is credited with the assertion that, if he had to dispose of either his Rembrandts or his Whistlers, it would be the former that he would relinquish.

There is a great difference, even in the point of view, between the Dutch master and his modern rival. Both approached their subject, if one may say so, in a reverential way; but the former with an absorption in the scene and a desire to reproduce it faithfully. Whistler, on the other hand, with more aloofness of feeling, selecting the mood or phase of it on which he chooses to dwell that he may inform it with his own personal sense of significance. The Rembrandt print--to borrow De Quincey’s distinction--is rather a triumph of knowledge; the Whistler a triumph of power. While the method of both represents the highest degree of pregnant succinctness, Rembrandt drew the landscape while Whistler transposes from it. The visible means, in his later etchings, become less and less, their significance continually fuller; and in his study of phases of nature he has carried the interpretation of light and atmosphere beyond the limits of Rembrandt.

In the “Thames Series,” which has perpetuated the since vanished characteristics of the old river side, he came nearest to the Dutch etcher, recording the scenes with a comprehension of detail as complete as that of Rembrandt’s “Mill.” Seeking always the significance of his subject, he seems to have felt that here the significance lay in the curious, dilapidated medley of details; that even a weather-worn timber and the very nails in it contributed their share to the impression, so that, while he must needs select and omit, the problem was one of how much to _avoid_ omitting. On the other hand, in his later prints, the problem is reversed. Following his own personal evolution toward more complete abstraction, both in sense and expression, it is how little he may put in and yet express the full significance.

Whistler’s art, in brief, is logically related, alike to realism, to the poetry of the men of 1830, and to the motives of the impressionists, and represents the wider influence of his times in its keen analysis of phenomena and the independently personal bias he has given to it; in the search for new sensations of the most subtle kind and in a tendency at times to exalt good manners, that is to say style, above the qualities of intrinsic merit. His art has been too much a product of himself, notwithstanding that it reflects in spiritualized form the higher tendencies of his age, for him to have been the founder of a school or to have influenced followers directly. Yet, indirectly, his influence has been weighty. Alike by his example and by his pungent utterances he has been instrumental, more than others, in giving a _quietus_ to mediocrity in art, both to the bathos of the literary picture and to the banality of merely imitative painting. Mediocrity still lingers and must linger as long as commonplace minds devote themselves to painting; but its prestige has been so successfully impaired that now we regard a taste for it on the part of a collector of pictures as an infantile disease, like the measles, incidental to an early career of appreciation, though not necessarily fatal to more matured connoisseurship.

Whether we shall ever reach that degree of cultivation which will need no further stimulus to enjoyment in a picture than such abstract suggestion to the imagination as music affords, time alone will show. Meanwhile, as we are able to conceive of a picture now, it has its genesis in the concrete, from which even Whistler has not tried to emancipate himself entirely. There is a beautiful humanity in most of his work, the humanity of human nature or the human relation of the landscape to ourselves; and if he is able sometimes to enchant us without any apparent human significance, it is because he is Whistler--a genius.

IV

JOHN SINGER SARGENT

A summary of John S. Sargent’s position as an artist must recall the exhibition of his work shown at Copley Hall, Boston, in 1899. There were exhibited some fifty portraits and seventy-five sketches and studies, while hard by in the Museum hung his large subject picture, “El Jaleo,” and in the library could be seen his mural decorations. It was an impressive showing, both in amount and quality, for an artist then little over forty years of age.

But Sargent has been a favoured child of the Muses, and early reached a maturity for which others have to labour long and in the face of disappointments. He, however, had never anything to unlearn. From the first he came under the influence of taste and style, the qualities which to this day most distinguish his work. The son of a Massachusetts gentleman who had retired from the practice of medicine in Philadelphia, he was born in Florence, and there spent his youth. The home life was penetrated with refinement; a good classical and modern education came in due course, and all around him were the dignity and beauty of Florence, its tender beauty of atmosphere and colour and the noble memorials of its galleries and streets. Perhaps no city in the world has so distinctive a spirit, at once stimulating to the intellect and refining to the senses. Those of us who have felt it only after years of buffeting in a grosser atmosphere can but guess what it means to have come under its influence from childhood, during the impressionable period of youth up to eighteen. And not as a mere resident of the place, from the force of habit purblind to its charm, but quickened by parents who themselves were products of another kind of civilization, keen to appreciate, to absorb, and to live in its spirit; possessed, also, of the American temperament so alert and sensitive to impressions, while removed from the dulling influence of our exceeding practicalness.

When the young Sargent knocked at the studio of Carolus-Duran in the _Boulevard Montparnasse_ with a portfolio of studies under his arm, drawings from Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, he was no smart young student, full of up-to-date ideas. Very modest he is described as being, of quiet, reflective disposition, pleased that his drawings won the approval of the master and the

enthusiasm of the students, and eager to set himself to learn. With a facility that was partly a natural gift, partly the result of a steady acceptance of the problems presented, he proceeded to absorb the master; his breadth of picturesque style and refined pictorial sense, his sound and scientific method, not devoid of certain tricks of illusion and his piquant and persuasive modernity--the sum total of an art that was a modern Frenchman’s paraphrase of one of the biggest of the old masters, Velasquez. At twenty-three he painted a portrait of Carolus, which shows he had absorbed his master so thoroughly as to be unconscious of the incidentals of his method and to have grasped only the essentials with such complete assimilation, that what he produces is already his own. Later, he himself visited Madrid and came under the direct spell of Velasquez. The grand line he had learned while still 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, realism of observation at once brilliant and refined, large and penetrating; and all these qualities he found united in the subtly grandiose canvases of the great Spaniard. Finally, from all these influences, he has fashioned a method very much his own.

And how shall one describe this 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 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 its abounding resourcefulness 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 attained it would have disturbed the balance of the whole. And yet this virtuosity, though it is French in character, is free of the French manner, as indeed of any mannerism. For example, his English men and women, his English children especially, belong distinctly to English life. Though he may portray them in terms of Parisian technique, he never confuses the idioms, being far too keenly alive to the subtle differences of race.

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. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he sees _the_ picture, the one which for the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth, rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct æsthetic charm; grandiose, for example, in the portrait of “Lady Elcho, Mrs. Arden, and Mrs. Tennant,” ravishingly elegant in the “Mrs. Meyer and Children,” delicately quaint in the “Beatrix,” and so on through a range of motives, each 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. And then, too, how tactful is the selection of pose, costume, and accessories! With what taste he creates environment for his conception of the subject!