Part 1

MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR EDITED BY -- T. LEMAN HARE

SARGENT

IN THE SAME SERIES

ARTIST. AUTHOR. VELAZQUEZ. S. L. BENSUSAN. REYNOLDS. S. L. BENSUSAN. TURNER. C. LEWIS HIND. ROMNEY. C. LEWIS HIND. GREUZE. ALYS EYRE MACKLIN. BOTTICELLI. HENRY B. BINNS. ROSSETTI. LUCIEN PISSARRO. BELLINI. GEORGE HAY. FRA ANGELICO. JAMES MASON. REMBRANDT. JOSEF ISRAELS. LEIGHTON. A. LYS BALDRY. RAPHAEL. PAUL G. KONODY. HOLMAN HUNT. MARY E. COLERIDGE. TITIAN. S. L. BENSUSAN. MILLAIS. A. LYS BALDRY. CARLO DOLCI. GEORGE HAY. GAINSBOROUGH. MAX ROTHSCHILD. TINTORETTO. S. L. BENSUSAN. LUINI. JAMES MASON. FRANZ HALS. EDGCUMBE STALEY. VAN DYCK. PERCY M. TURNER. LEONARDO DA VINCI. M. W. BROCKWELL. RUBENS. S. L. BENSUSAN. WHISTLER. T. MARTIN WOOD. HOLBEIN. S. L. BENSUSAN. BURNE-JONES. A. LYS BALDRY. VIGÉE LE BRUN. C. HALDANE MACFALL. CHARDIN. PAUL G. KONODY. FRAGONARD. C. HALDANE MACFALL. MEMLINC. W. H. J. & J. C. WEALE. CONSTABLE. C. LEWIS HIND. RAEBURN. JAMES L. CAW. JOHN S. SARGENT T. MARTIN WOOD.

_Others in Preparation._

SARGENT

BY T. MARTIN WOOD

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Plate Page

I. Lord Ribblesdale Frontispiece In the collection of Lord Ribblesdale

II. La Carmencita 14 In the Luxembourg, Paris

III. Ellen Terry as "Lady Macbeth" 24 In the National Gallery, Millbank

IV. W. Graham Robertson, Esq. 34 In the collection of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.

V. Carnation Lily, Lily Rose 40 In the National Gallery, Millbank

VI. Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Lady Tennant 50 In the collection of the Hon. Percy Wyndham

VII. The Misses Wertheimer 60 In the collection of Asher Wertheimer, Esq.

VIII. Mrs. A. L. Langman 70 In the collection of A. L. Langman, Esq., C.M.G.

I

Was there ever a more romantic time than our own, or a people who took everything more matter-of-factly? The paintings of a period contain all its enthusiasms and illusions. We remember the eighteenth century--at least in England--by Reynolds' and Gainsborough's art, the seventeenth century by Van Dyck's; and when we remember the eighteenth century in France, it is to think of Watteau, who expressed what his world, drifting towards disaster, cared about--an illusion of a never-ending summer's day. These names are expressive of their times, and Sargent's art, with disillusioned outlook, mirrors an obvious aspect of English life to-day. Above all others he has taken his world as it is, with the delight in life, in its everyday appearance, with which the representative artists of any period have been gifted.

Perhaps the next generation will feel that it owes more to him than to any painter of this time. For the ephemeralities of the moment in costume and fashion are the blossoms in which life seeks expression--whatever its fruit. It is agreed that everything is expression, from a spring bud bursting to a ribbon worn for a moment against a woman's hair. And who deals with the surface of life deals with realities, for the rest is guess-work.

Often enough this content to take the world as it is may result in things which do not charm us, and perhaps Sargent has never been one of those as fastidious in selection as in delineation. Sometimes he gives his sitters away--for there are traits in human nature, belief in thevery existence of which we are always anxious to forego. Nothing escapes him that is written in the face. Yet he is not cynical, but man of the world, the felicity of living in a world where everything is charming being only for those with the gift to live in one of their own making.

The side of life which he expresses is that in which time seems given over wholly to social amenities, long afternoons spent in pleasant intercourse, hours well ordered and protected, so that the most fragrant qualities in human nature can if they will spring to life. We almost hear the teacups in the other room, and none of his sitters seem really alone. We feel they have left the life to which they belong to sit to the artist but only for an hour or so. The social world to which they belong will absorb them again. This world Sargent paints. Even in many of his single figures we are conscious always of its existence in the background. In portrait after portrait there is scarcely a suggestion of self-consciousness--but the man or the woman just at the moment of posing, as if environed still in an atmosphere of their own, and of the world from which they have withdrawn for the sitting. For it is Sargent's gift to remove the impression that his sitter has posed, that the dress was arranged, and his gift to arrest his sitter's habitual gesture, the impression of sparkling stones, almost the clink of bangles at the wrist in expression of the moment. Most unjustly was it said that he could not paint pretty women. It would appear to be within his power to paint almost anything that has its existence in fact, and if in a matter-of-fact way, what more to the point if the facts are so beautiful that fancy itself would have to defer?

Supreme is the art of Sargent in its appreciation of those pleasures which would almost seem for art alone: pearls upon the colour of flesh; slight transitions of colour charged with great secrets of beauty; pearls painted as they would be regarded by a lover, as ten thousand times more beautiful than if they were lying in a box. And the touches of the brush--for Sargent shows every touch--breathe sympathy with every change of colour as the chain of pearls falls first across white silk and then across black velvet, and the little globes take to themselves new variations. A fan is opened, and upon the ivory sticks the light like silver trembles, a web of colour is spun across upon the open ribs; a book is half-open, it may be a Bradshaw, but we will believe it is a book of old verse, for everything that comes into the picture, the particular picture of which I am thinking, comes into a charmed circle. There are people for whom the opulent world of Sargent's art is their everyday world--whose life competes with the splendour of day-dreams. How essentially romantic--although so matter-of-fact--must be the art that leaves us with this impression! To be matter-of-fact is, we see, far from being unromantic; the reverse indeed is true, for with our face turned from the world romance vanishes.

II

I once had occasion to call on Mr. Sargent, and was shown into a room with a black carpet. Only a colourist loves black, and sees it as a colour. And this room, so free from all that was novel and without associations, helped to explain to me why, though his method is so modern and of the moment, his pictures of aristocrats accommodate themselves to ancestral surroundings. For it is true that not only the face and the clothes of his sitters are given, but somehow, in the material of paint, their social position and their distinction. Now this is not by any means the least of Sargent's qualities; it is not a common one. Well-bred people drive up to the door of a modern studio almost visibly cloaked in the traditions of their race, but we are led to believe that they must have left all this behind them in the carriage when we see the portrait in an exhibition; the artist has shown nothing of it, has used his distinguished sitter simply as a model. For lack of inspiration novelties are proffered in its place, _L'art nouveau_ on canvas. Sargent does not paint modern people as if they all came into the world yesterday landed from an airship. No, he is like Van Dyck, who not only painted the beautiful clothes, the long white hands, and the bearing of his sitters sympathetically, but also the very atmosphere of the Court around them, painting, as all great painters do, invisible as well as visible things. If there is not in Sargent's painting courtesy of touch, if his method has not suavity in painting elegant people, this is rather as it should be in an age which trusts implicitly to the dressmaker and tailor for its elegance. And without a word here as to the worth of some of our modern aims, at least the age is too much in earnest for a pose. The poses and fripperies of the pictures of Van Dyck and Kneller are done with; and besides, the modern baronet is not anxious to show his hands, but is painted gloved, and Work goes unimmortalised. Meunier the sculptor and other modern artists having gloried in the war of labour, its victories go unsung; its victors surviving only as fashionable men.

The portraits of some painters suggest nothing but the foreign atmosphere of a studio, but Sargent seems to meet his sitters in the atmosphere of their own daily, fashionable life, and that is why his pictures are romantic, for isn't there romance wherever there is wealth? The people whose wealth is such that they can take as their own background all the beautiful accessories of aristocratic tradition, are entitled to them if they like them well enough to spend their money in this way. And it is the peculiar gift of our age to recognise in ourselves the heirs of the centuries of beautiful handicrafts, which we close with our machines. They certainly are the heirs to any kind of beauty who have the imagination to enjoy it. And the imagination for past associations, who have this more than the Americans? We believe in England that all Americans are rich, that they can buy whatever they appreciate. So by the divine right of things going to those who appreciate them, the rich American is now, even as Sargent paints him, environed by old French and English things and their associations. And in connection with the accessories in Sargent's pictures, might we not ask the question whether it could not be considered a test of the worth or worthlessness, from a point of beauty, of any ornament or furniture whether it would survive representation in a picture? How much modern stuff we should have to sweep aside! And now that one thinks of it, modern pictures have left modern furniture rather severely alone--the painters have not been faithful to their brethren the makers of modern tables and chairs. Who is more modern than Sargent--and I am trying to think has he ever painted a modern room--that is, a room with modern things in it? The rooms that the most modern people live in are oddly enough the ones that are most old-fashioned, filled with eighteenth-century things. This, to reflect upon, has arisen through thinking about Sargent's interior paintings, which so very vividly and accurately reflect the attitude of the modern world to its own time. In that word modern, if we are not using it too often, we must seek the nature of Sargent's painting, its spirit; it is the most interesting thing in connection with painting to come as close as possible to its spirit. And what a test before any work of art, to ask whether it is worth a search for the incorporeal element; although in vain, in spite of Walter Pater, does painting aspire "towards the condition of music," since music is as ghostly as the ghosts that it contains.

III

Dancing has been a theme always appealing to artists because of its rhythm, its grace in reality, its incarnation of femininity. It contains all the inspiration for a painter in any one moment of movement. No two things could be further removed from each other than Lancret's "La Camargo Dansant" and Sargent's "Carmencita," yet some alliterative resemblance in the name and some resemblance in the dancers' costumes bring these two figures together in my mind--the one the fairy artificial dancer, the princess of an unreal world, the other a vivid sinuous presentment. With both painters the costume has interested them as much almost as the figure, for the dress of a dancer, indeed the dress of any woman, is in a Sargent picture a part of herself, nothing mere dead matter, everything expressive, the brush having come at once to the secret that no one material thing is more spiritual than another. For ever Carmencita stands, waiting for the beginning of the music, just as La Camargo is caught upon the wing of movement, seeming to revive the music that was played for her and cheating us with a sense of a world happier than it is. In Carmencita we have that living beauty from which, after all, a dreamer must take every one of his dreams. It is Sargent's wisdom to stand thus close to life. In the sense of this reality, and the difficulty of approach to it with anything so constitutionally artificial as a painter's colours, do we apprise the real nature of his gifts. The roses on La Camargo's dress are artificial roses, but not more artificial than her face and hands. This figure is only a little nearer to nature than a china shepherdess, it is the fancy of a mind cheating itself with unrealities as realities. Sargent himself has painted artificial things, the rouge on lips, the powder on a face; since it is natural for some folk to rouge, that is the nature which he paints. Only an imaginative woman makes herself up. A painter with more imagination than Sargent would enter into the spirit of her arts. Sargent's betrayal of his fashionable sitters has frightened many, but if anything it has increased his vogue; for above everything an imaginative woman is curious to know what she looks like to others, and a Sargent's portrait is intimate, unflattering, perfectly candid but perfectly true as an answer to her question.

Everything on the stage is artificial; what will this art, that has had of the reality of things all its strength and life, make of a purely theatrical picture--Miss Ellen Terry in a famous part? The artificiality of the stage always presents two aspects, that one in which we forget its artificiality and that other in which we remember it. And this latter, to my mind, is the aspect in which Sargent has painted this picture, without, as it were, ever stepping over the footlights into the world that only becomes real on the other side of them. But the exactness of his interpretation beautifully explains the scene.

"Carnation Lily, Lily Rose" was painted in a garden by the Thames. Two children are lighting up the Chinese lanterns, and in their light and with flowers surrounding, Sargent sees for a moment life itself by accident made idyllic. The picture is Japanese in its sense of decoration, as if decoration and idyllic moments always went together. It would almost seem so from the study of art, for without exception, those painters who have been conscious of the ideal and idyllic element in life, have always shown this through composition which, whilst dealing with a real scene, has taken a little of the reality from it. There must be an essentially musical element in the art which takes a mood as well as a scene from nature, and brings us by way of real scenes to that imaginative country which exists in every nature-lover's mind; a country partly made up of the remembrance of other places which have been like the place where he now stands.

Great tiger-lilies hang over the children. We almost expect in these surroundings pierettes or fantastic lovers, but we are kept close to the beauty of reality by the naturalism with which the children have been painted. Not one touch is given as a concession to their fairy and dramatic background, not one ribbon, nothing in the costume to enable them to enter into the patterned world of art as part of a design. For above everything the painter has wished to persuade us of life itself as a picture, and not of his ability to make these children the motifs of design. Their ordinariness irritates me personally, they do not seem quite to belong to their fairy land, but I recognise that this matter-of-factness peculiarly belongs to Sargent's art and am interested in the attitude that takes beauty so matter-of-factly.

IV

No one has encountered the beauty of woman's face more casually than Sargent, no one has made us realise more fully its significance as a fact in the world. After all we had thought perhaps we were partly deceived in this matter by the illusions of poets and love-sick painters, but approaching it without ecstasy, art has not been closer to this beauty than here. I am looking at a half-tone reproduction of a lady by Sargent, wondering whether in the history of English portrait painting an artist has approached as closely to the thoughts of his sitter. The expression of the face is determined partly by thoughts within, partly by light without. And it is as if with the touch of a brush a thought could be intercepted as it passed the lips. This is the nearest approach that thought has ever had to material definition. Thought is the architect of her expression, by accuracy of painting it is copied, just as the back of a fan or bracelet is copied--things so material as that. So after all thoughts are not so far away from the material world with which we are in touch; are scarcely less visible than air. The impressionists have rendered air; and would it be too far-fetched to hint that the shadow on the lips almost serves to bridge one province with another, the atmosphere without and that which reigns within the sitter's mind. It is when Sargent's brush hesitates at the lips and eyes, at the threshold of intimate revelation, that we really begin to form an adequate conception of his genius. Yes, of things fleeting, a thought flitting across the face, interrupted gestures--and the mysterious suggestion of conversation hanging fire between the sitter and ourself, Sargent is the master. Sometimes a portrait painter will create a face on canvas, of pleasant expression, which is not like his sitter, and it is as if with every touch he could change the thoughts as he changes the expression in the face he is creating.

Sargent's accuracy is such that the expression that passes over the face in his portraits is one which all the sitter's friends recognise; so close is he in touch with the delicate drawing, especially round the lips, that his brush never strays by one little bit into the realm of invention. There are other painters painting as carefully, faces as full of expression, who do not come near a likeness of their sitter. In what provinces close to nature are they wandering, since, striving to paint the face before them, they paint another face? We must not forget, in thinking of Sargent's greatness, that he unfailingly is in close touch with his sitters' expression, that is, almost with their thoughts.

Although Sargent has proved in many landscapes his powers in that direction, he too well enters into the spirit of the portraiture to which he has put his hand to attempt to introduce naturalistic effects into backgrounds obviously painted in a London studio. The landscape background is sometimes charming if under these circumstances it remains a convention; for there are moments when nature herself is out of place, pictures in which human nature must be the only form of life,--with the exception perhaps of flowers, for these accompany human nature always, to revelries where sunlight is excluded, and even to the tomb. It is art of little carrying power that is exhausted upon some transcript of beautiful detail, colour of the glazes of a vase, a bunch of flowers. Sargent embraces difficulties one after another with energy unexpended. Physique, but never genius will give out. Energy of this order always goes with a generous, because very human, outlook; success on occasion being modified not through failure to accomplish, but through failure to respond.

V