Part 14

Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness and elaborateness of composition than the painter dreamt of in his art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic. It was not exactly his _métier_, and though he took it up with energy when asked to do so, he succeeded in producing little more than an enlargement of his easel pictures. The same tone, light, and color of his portraits and single figures went into the groupings in the Congressional Library, the Harrisburg Capitol, and the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh. The Library decorations gave the “Evolution of the Book” in six lunettes that illustrated the stages of book-making rather than symbolized or epitomized them. At Harrisburg the theme was the “Evolution of the State,” another set of fourteen lunettes. The decoration at Pittsburgh was the most ambitious performance of the three and sought to tell the story of Pittsburgh--the story of steel and labor. It is called the “Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” with the city personified by a knight in armor with a flaming sword in his hand instead of the large female figure of conventional decoration. The panels carry over three stories of the entrance-hall of the Carnegie Institute and some five hundred figures are used. The first floor shows the half-naked furnacemen at work amid smoke, steam, and fire glare. The smoke and steam rise up and envelop, make an atmospheric setting for, the allegorical figures of the second floor that from all sides are bringing tributes to the mailed figure of Pittsburgh. The allegorical figures are winged, robed in long trailing garments, and drift lightly through the air or upon clouds. The third floor contains lunettes typifying the arts and sciences.

The whole decoration is well thought out, and is put together, within its framings of yellowish marble, with a distinctly decorative effect. The tone of it is quiet, subdued, restful--perhaps too much so. The figures are graceful, even the men--again, perhaps too much so. One is not sorry that Labor is shown with cheerful face and normal body rather than sad-browed, nerve-racked, and body-wrecked, after the Zola-Meunier formula. That exaggeration has become just as conventional and wearisome as the prettiness of Bouguereau, or the pettiness of Meissonier. But Alexander’s workers are perhaps too elegant for reality as his floating figures are too graceful for allegory. There is a feeling that there is not enough mental grip about them. It is paradoxical to say that the decoration is too decorative, but that states the case quite rightly. The pattern and the color that set off an easel picture appropriately fail to carry when employed on so vast a scale of wall decoration--fail to carry from sheer attenuation of motive and design. The Pittsburgh decoration has not enough strength behind it to spread over five thousand feet of painted surface. Strength was never a quality of Alexander’s art. He had skill, grace, refinement, charm, style, but he never attempted to win by force or power.

After his return from Paris in 1901 he took up his permanent residence in New York and immediately entered into the art life of the city and the country. He had received gold medals at Paris and St. Louis and the Legion of Honor from France, had placed his pictures in public galleries all the way from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Chicago, and had become a member of some twenty art societies. In addition to the McDowell Club and the School Art League he was the head of the Federation of Fine Arts, the Society of Mural Painters, and from 1909 the president of the National Academy of Design. His interest in art movements was great and the energy he gave to them was at the expense not only of his painting but his health. As president of the Academy of Design his devotion was unflagging even though it met with almost everything but encouragement and success. During his presidency he took up anew the problem of a building site which had been dragging along for years. There had been failure in Fifty-seventh Street in 1896, and over the Lenox Library plot in 1904, but Alexander failed four further times with the sites of the Arsenal, the Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Railroad Yard.

This with many other burdens he was carrying helped to wear him out. He had never been robust. On the contrary, he was of delicate, refined physique and possessed of a mental energy that far outran his bodily strength. Moreover, he never knew how to spare himself. In his last years with many overhead burdens to carry he could still take on new enterprises. At Onteora, where he had a summer home, he became much interested in costuming and decorative settings for the theatre, and later, with Mrs. Alexander, made many designs for Miss Maude Adams’s productions of “Jeanne d’Arc,” “Peter Pan,” “Chantecler,” and “The Little Minister.” In New York he presided over the National Institute of Arts and Letters, spoke at every gathering of art people, and was at the beck and call of society whenever anything of an artistic nature was desired. At the last--that is, in 1915--death came to him quite suddenly.

Both socially and artistically Alexander had become a man of distinction. Every one liked his refined, gentlemanly personality, admired his art, and listened to his counsel. For these reasons and because of his commanding position he came to have a strong influence in all art matters. He had set a pattern that many of the younger painters followed, and, like Chase, had helped to establish the latter-day tradition of craftsmanship here in America. It was not the exact craftsmanship of Chase or Alexander or Sargent that was established, though each of them has had his imitators. The movement for sound technical education in American art was of no one painter’s devising. The three were typical of the movement, but there were others--Weir, Twachtman, Beckwith, Blum, Brush, Thayer, Dewing, Cox, Blashfield--who were of the same faith and who added their quota of strength. All of them working together, with a common energy and enthusiasm, have created a body of belief as to what constitutes style and skill in art. They have established a tradition based in sound craftsmanship than which nothing could be safer or better for the future of American art. It was Alexander’s part to help lay the foundation-stones. War or national madness or economic change may prevent any splendid palace of art arising therefrom, but at least Alexander and his contemporaries builded the firm foundation--builded perhaps better than they knew.

X

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.

He remained under Carolus for several years, assisted the master in some of his decorations, and soon began to produce noteworthy work of his own. One of his earliest portraits was that of Carolus himself, which at once became talked about, not only as a likeness of the famous master but as the work of a remarkable pupil. In 1878 he painted _En route pour la pêche_, a figure composition which attracted much attention in the Salon. The next year he went to Spain, and from that journey came “El Jaleo,” now in the Boston Museum, and a number of other Spanish pictures. These theme pictures, much as they were praised, did not, could not, determine the painter’s bent. Like other young men, he probably had determined nothing, and eventually let circumstances settle the matter of subject. He did not have to wait long. In 1881 he put out a full-length portrait called a “Lady with Rose” that had so much vitality about it, as well as charm, that it far outran all his earlier performances. The success of it, followed by the “Hall of the Four Children,” in which four of the Beit children were shown, and then the portrait of “Madame G----,” seemed automatically to place him among the portraitists.

The last-named picture, a full-length in profile, now in the Metropolitan Museum, set all Paris by the ears. The wonderful if somewhat sharp drawing of the face and head, the equally fine portraiture of the hands, arms, figure, and dress, commanded instant attention. The subject was a great beauty, and the painter, painting precisely what he saw, had dealt with her remorselessly. Even then they began to discuss Sargent as a character reader, an anatomist, a psychologist, a physiognomist--great nonsense to be sure, but nevertheless suggestive of his remarkable truth of observation. It was perhaps this very quality that soon brought him more commissions for portraits than he could fill and possibly led to the virtual abandonment for the time being of other themes.

In taking up portraiture as the field of his endeavor Sargent was perhaps wise as well as fortunate, for it requires the keen, cool observer, the man who can record the fact without romance, to make a good portrait-painter; and Sargent has proved himself an observer above all. He is not a poet in paint, nor does he indulge in sentiment, feeling, or emotion. He records the fact. If I apprehend him rightly, such theory of art as he possesses is founded in observation. One night in Gibraltar some fifteen years ago I was dining with him at the old Cecil Hotel. We had been on ship for a dozen days and were glad to get ashore. That night, as a very unusual thing, Sargent talked about painting--talked of his own volition. He suggested his theory of art in a single sentence: “You see things that way” (pointing slightly to the left) “and I see them this way” (pointing slightly to the right). He seemed to think that would account for the variation or peculiarity of eye and mind, and, with a manner of doing--a personal method--there was little more to art. Such a theory would place him in measured agreement with Henry James, whose definition of art has been quoted many times: “Art is a point of view and genius a way of looking at things.” But whether Sargent has followed James, or James followed Sargent, in that definition, I am not able to record.

James, however, did not stop on that precise line. In 1887 in writing about Sargent he said: “The highest result is attained when to the element of quick perception a certain faculty of lingering reflection is added,” and he continued, “I mean the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and humanizes the technical problems.” James certainly meant by that sympathy, deep human interest, if not sentiment, feeling, and emotion; but Sargent never showed these qualities in his work and has more than once repudiated them by word of mouth. It is a popular contention that he does see “new things that were not on the surface,” that he is a character reader; and that he is a bitter satirist in paint. Again the painter has denied these alleged accomplishments, and with some warmth into the bargain.

Frank Millet told me years ago that Sargent, painting at Broadway, England, needed a white marble column in a picture he was then working upon. There was none at hand, but, at Millet’s suggestion, he got a carpenter to make a wooden column and had it painted a clean white. This was set up and Sargent tried to paint it in the picture as a marble column, but with the unexpected result that on the canvas it looked not like marble but like a wooden column painted white. He could not get below “the surface,” though he tried to do so. And Kenyon Cox in a strikingly just estimate of Sargent[17] tells this story: “He had painted a portrait in which he was thought to have brought out the inner nature of his sitter, and to have ‘seen through the veil’ of the external man. When asked about it he is said to have expressed some amazement at the idea, and to have remarked: ‘If there were a veil I should paint the veil; I can paint only what I see.’” And Cox adds: “Whether he said it or not, I am inclined to think that this sentence expresses the truth.” It does; and also Sargent’s self-imposed limitation. He does not want to see below the surface; he thinks the surface in itself, if rightly handled, is sufficient. But there is an explanation that may reconcile these different contentions.

[17] _Old Masters and New_, by Kenyon Cox, New York, 1905.

A painter who has been looking at human heads for many years sees more than the man who casually looks up to recognize an acquaintance on the street. I do not mean that he sees more “character”--that is more scholarship or conceit or pride of purse or firmness of will or shrewdness of thought; but merely that he sees the physical conformation more completely than we do. Well, every one sooner or later moulds his own face. It becomes marked or set or shaped in response to continued methods of thinking and acting. When that face comes under the portrait-painter’s eye he does not see the scholar, the banker, the senator, the captain of industry; but he does see, perhaps, certain depressions of the cheek or lines about the eyes or mouth or contractions of the lips or protrusions of the brow or jaw that appeal to him strongly because they are cast in shadow or thrown up sharply in relief of light. These surface features he paints perhaps with more emphasis than they possess in the original because they appeal to him emphatically, and presently the peculiar look that indicates the character of the man appears. What the look may indicate, or what kind or phase of character may be read in or out of the look, the portrait-painter does not usually know or care. It is not his business to know. He paints what he sees and has as little discernment of a character as of a mind. He gives, perhaps without knowing their meaning, certain protrusions and recessions of the surface before him and lets the result tell what tale it may.