Part 2

The life of a busy portrait painter, with its demand for inspiration every morning, is of the most exacting nature, and the quality of the painter's output must of necessity vary. The nervous strain is great, for sitters are capricious, and always is the temptation present to the one sin that is unforgivable, compromise with the Philistine--the concession of genius to stupidity, of perceptions nearly divine to ignorance. Genius has always had difficulty in working to order, yet nearly all the great portraiture work in the world has been done to order. But one imagines that the conditions under which the masterpieces of a modern painter, with so great a vogue as Sargent's, have been produced must be unparalleled by anything in the history of ancient painting. A crowd streamed through the studios of Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Romney to be painted, but the world was smaller then, and their art was more easily done. They worked within a convention narrower than Sargent's, compromising with nature at the very start; a convention more beautiful than his, a garden, beautiful because it was confined and seen in an accustomed light. If things are beautiful at all they become more so when they are no longer unaccustomed, when they fit in with an old frame of mind. Sargent deals with the unaccustomed--in which at first perhaps we always see the ugly--whilst, as we have said, he does not destroy, as the vandalistic art of some painters does, the connection between the past and present. It is the present which his art embraces, but we might almost say we are never thoroughly accustomed to the present until it has become the past. So to us Sargent's art is not as beautiful as Gainsborough's, for it has constantly to throw over some old form of perfection to embrace a new difficulty. In the eighteenth century there was less variety in the life which art encountered. The life of even a Gainsborough or a Reynolds would be circumscribed in just the same way that their art is circumscribed, uninterrupted in its mood, and beauty is to be found in uninterrupted moods.

VI

Something should now be said of Sargent's method--of that which is spoken of as his technique. And of method, it is not something to be separated from the painter's temperament, it is always autographic. Somehow, temperament shows even in a person's handwriting, giving it what is really its style, though the fashion of writing imposed upon a pupil by his master is also called a style. In art there is no word that is oftener debated. And of those who speak most of style in their own work, the measure of their self-consciousness in the matter is often the measure of their distance from it. They are in the position of a schoolboy taking writing lessons, and their style, if ever they are to have one, does not begin until thinking and painting have become for them almost one process. But this is a difficult matter to make clear, and apology should perhaps be forthcoming for touching on so debatable a point thus hurriedly. I may have said something perhaps to convey to the lay reader the significance of the particular method of treating his subjects which we identify with Sargent. The pupil of Carolus Duran, his method was formed under the most modern influences; whatever effect quite another kind of training might have had on Sargent, still nothing but the traceable element of self would have determined for us his style. The method of applying paint to canvas has always resolved itself into more or less a personal question, though certain schools are to be identified with different ways of seeing; every method is a convention, and the difference of conventions always one of vision, affecting handling only in the sense that it has to be accommodated to the vision. It would be out of place here, perhaps, and far too technical, to define the difference between such a method as Sargent's and say that of Pre-Raphaelitism. But roughly, the Pre-Raphaelite concentrates on each object. For each object, say in a room, is in turn his subject as he paints that room. The impressionist, Sargent, only has the one subject, that room, the different objects in it explaining themselves only in so far as their surfaces and character are defined in the general impression by the way they take the light--in short, almost an impression as it would be received on a lens. If we remember all this we can appreciate the extreme sensitiveness both of Sargent's vision and touch. For his brush conveys almost with the one touch--so spontaneous in feeling is his work--not only the amount but the shape of the light on any surface. Thus the shapes of everything in the picture are finally resolved, and we might also say without curiosity as to their causes. We are given the impression, which would have been our own impression: since in regard to a portrait, for instance, when we meet a person our curiosity does not immediately extend to such details as the character and number of buttons on his coat. With this method always goes spontaneity, Sargent's pre-eminent gift. He values it so highly that he does not scruple to recommence a picture more than once and carry it through again in the one mood, if in the first instance his art may have miscarried, not permitting himself to doctor up the first attempt. To the constant sense of freshness in his work which such a way of working must imply, I think a great measure of his vogue is to be attributed, though others have coloured more prettily, flattered more, and subordinated themselves to the amiable ambitions of their sitters.

VII

Is it a fancy?--but I see a resemblance between the art of Sargent and that in writing of Mr. Henry James. The same pleasure in nuances of effect in detail, and the readiness to turn to the life at hand for this. To enjoy Sargent is above all to appreciate the means by which he obtains effect in detail, the economy of colour and of brush marks with which he deceives the eye, and the quality of subtle colour in the interpretation of minor phenomena. On the large scale, in the general effect, the quality of his colour is sometimes uninviting. But when at its best it takes the everyday colour of things as if it was colour, without the hysterical exaggeration with which so much youthful contemporary art attempts to cheat itself and other people. If Sargent's admirers do not claim that he sees all the colour there is in things, they claim for him that he sees colour and has the reverence for reality which prevents a tawdry emphasis upon it for the sake of sweetness of effect. And after the sweetmeat vagaries, which have followed in the wake of Whistler, by those without that master's self-control, this is refreshing.

Sargent's brush seems to trifle with things that are trifling, to proceed thoughtfully in its approach to lips and eyes. In painting accessories around his sitters there is the accommodation of touch to the importance of the objects suggested, and nowadays, since interior painting is the fashion--to suit the taste of a young man of genius imposing his peculiar gift upon the time--there are many portraits where the sitter is brought into line with an elaborate setting out of _objets d'art_, the painter's pleasure in the treatment of these manifesting itself sometimes at the sitter's expense. Translating everything by the methods we have described, Sargent preserves throughout his pictures a certain quality of paint. The impression of the characteristic surface of any material is made within this quality, by the responsiveness of his brush to the subtlest modification of effect which differentiates between the nature of one surface and another, as they are influenced by the light upon them at the moment. There are painters who do not translate reality into paint in this way, but who have striven to imitate the surface qualities of objects by varying, imitative ways of applying their paint. Sargent is not this kind of realist.

He is a realist in the sense that Goya, the great Spanish painter of the eighteenth century, was one, for the Spaniard had just such an eagerness to come closer to the sense of life than the close imitation of its outside could bring him. Sargent is more polite, less impetuous, but still it is life as it is, that quickens his brush and informs all his virtuosity. His technique presents life vividly, but presents it to us with a sense of accomplishment in art, the equivalent of the accomplished art of living of the majority of his sitters. I am thinking of a portrait of a lady, and she is turning the leaves of a book, and in the lowered eyes, and the movement of the hand, there is more than arrested movement, there is an expression of an attitude consciously assumed which ordinarily would have been an unconscious one, and so accurate is the painting, that the sitter is detected as it were in this self-consciousness. In portraits of a ceremonial order, for people to sit in a group with a pleasant indispensable air of naturalness, is of course an affair on the artist's part of very thoughtful arrangement. But while composition should not betray the affectation of natural movement, movement must not be conveyed in a merely sensational, snapshot manner. For the slightest reflection on this matter will betray to us that in the latter pretension we are cheated, since we cannot fail to remember that to complete the canvas the sitter must have recovered the pose day after day, hour after hour, in the studio. Sargent's instincts are so tuned to the appropriate, having the tact which itself is art, that whilst in this kind of portraiture we do not question the grouping or the movement of his sitters as unreal, we do not accept it as quite natural. We instinctively know that in proportion as it is made to look too natural it would be unreal, untrue to the conditions which the painter's art actually encountered. Sargent, who permits nothing to stand between him and nature, will not permit such an inartistic lie to stand between us and the sincerity of his painting. He does not betray us in his love of what is of the moment, by giving us sham of this kind instead of the real thing.

At every point at which we take his art and examine it, the evidence all points to one form of success. The sitters posing are really posing, their action is not even made unnaturally real as we have shown, and in the distances in the room round them, there is the reality of space dividing them from things at the other end of the room. Reality, within the confines of the particular truths to which his method is subject, has been the evident intention all through his art. From this standpoint it often compels admiration in cases where it would have to be withdrawn were we substituting in our mind another ideal, examining his work, for instance, only in the light of a sensitive colour beauty which the painter has not put first and foremost. Some artists have embraced reality only as it justified their imagination. If we look on Sargent's art for anything inward except that which looks through the eyes and determines the smile of his sitter, we shall find our sympathies break down. Unnecessary perhaps to say this, yet it were as well to make quite clear the light in which we should regard the work of an artist who has wholly succeeded in self-expression, the only known form of success in art.

In analysing some men's work, we wish above all to know them, to know the mind that thus environs itself. With others it is their art which tempts us to further and further knowledge of its truths while, as with Shakespeare, the artist behind it becomes impersonal. Thus it is with Sargent's art. It is true that if we wish to know an artist we can never under any circumstances become more intimate with him than in his art, whether we find him in it far away in remote valleys or at the centre of fashionable life. And this though the dreamer may be a man of fashion and the painter of society live a life retired.

Of Sargent's water-colours, much might be said. To some extent they explain his oils, yet he seems to allow himself in them a greater freedom, just as the medium itself is freer than that of oils--more accidental, and the masters of this art control its propensity for accidental effect as its very spirit, guiding it with skill to results which baffle and perplex by the ingenuity with which they give illusion. First, as last, a painter has to accept the fact that he conveys nothing except by illusion; that he can never bring his easel so close to the subject, or his materials to such minuteness of touch, that his art becomes pure imitation; nor can he secure the adjustment of proportion between a large subject and a small panel which would give in every case such imitation. The supreme artist accepts the standpoint first instead of last, and the greater his art becomes, the greater his power in its mysterious control of effect.

VIII

There are some painters whose work we may personally wholly dislike--dislike their outlook--even our favourite subjects becoming intolerable to us in their art. It is something in their nature antipathetic to our own. Of course, mediocre work does not assume such proportions in our mind. Then there are painters who, through some affinity of temperament with our own, make everything their art touches pleasant to us. And then there are the impersonal artists, Velazquez, Millais, and Sargent, taking apparently quite an impersonal view of life. Sargent's world is everybody's world, and if we are affected one way or another by it, it is as life affects us.

One has heard a painter say, "I can paint those things because I love them." Judged by his treatment of so many things, of nearly everything, how much must Sargent love life. One man can paint flowers and another marble--Sargent paints everything; and, to paraphrase, almost it might be said that what he doesn't paint isn't worth painting. But all this is nothing if he never penetrates, as Meissonier and others never penetrated, below the surface; if he gave no symbols in his art of things invisible.

We like some of the subjects he has painted, others we dislike so much that we wonder he has painted them; just as in life there are people and surroundings to which we are attracted, and others from whom we keep away.

To the realist by temperament the effect of the details of any scene accepted direct from nature provide exciting inspiration, and he least of all is likely to turn to decorative composition, which, with its resemblance to a form imposed in verse, only aids in the interpretation of the subject in proportion as it is imaginatively inspired. A painter pre-occupied with the opportunities which any incident may offer for the interpretation of subtleties, will often accept any scene from nature and almost any point of view as composition. For the old formulas of composition--of the time when composition was regarded as something to be taught--went with a decorative conception of things, was in itself a form of decoration. And whilst it has been said that all art is decorative, it will perhaps be found that the naturalistic painter is too much excited with incident to scheme much for a rhythmic presentation of it in the frame. Such a canvas as Sargent's "Salmon Fishing in Norway," lately exhibited in the McCulloch collection, a portrait painted in the open, of a youth resting on the bank of a river with caught salmon and tackle beside him, the centre of a skilfully painted piece of landscape, is a case in point. The difficulties which subjects have presented have often seemed Sargent's inspiration in landscape: rocks presenting surfaces to the light with a thousand variations; the wet basins of bronze fountains receiving coloured reflections and the diamond lights in the fountain splashes; grey architecture with its soft shadows, architecture white in the sun with its cool blue shadows, like fragments of night in the doorways. It is this mysterious sensation of light and shadow alternating everywhere, changing the colour of the day itself as the day advances, which Sargent meets. He is one of the few painters who have faced the noon. He has this great command of art's slender resources, and he is matter-of-fact enough to be happy at this uncompromising time of day, unbelieved in by the workers, so inconsiderate to the lazy with its heat. The noon has not many with its praises, and "all great art is praise." Painters have got up at dawn to communicate to us its everyday recurring freshness, as of an eternal spring, and has not evening always been the painter's hour? Sargent has faced the noon, which demands so much sensitiveness that the over-sensitive shrink. His brush has given it in water-colours the finest interpretation it has yet received.

IX

To go back to the matter of composition again. In his portrait groups, where the mere fact that the sitters have to be grouped implies that he is not dealing from the start with an impression direct, we find he is a master of the finest composition, as in his group of Mrs. Carl Meyer and children. And yet to one who will take not one touch with his brush from what is not before him, such a view of his subject must be incalculable in its difficulties.

The painter has never made a passage of painting the excuse for incongruity. The arrangements in his pictures are always probable. It is legitimate in many cases that they should only be imaginatively probable. Any arrangement is probable in a studio, and affording themselves too much licence in this respect some painters wonder why the public are inclined to discredit most of what they do. The logical quality, the sanity of Sargent's art is yet another reason for its vogue; it has not the unreasonableness of studio production, it commends itself to a world that perhaps is not wrong in assuming that the artistic licence is applied for by those who are not sane. Sargent has on occasion had to resort to all sorts of devices to obtain effects and composition that he has desired, but he has always kept faith with the public, and had the true artist's regard for their illusions. He allows his sitters to wear their best clothes, but he never dresses them up; no, to please him they must wholly belong to the life of which they are a part, it is the attitude in which they interest him and all of us. We have then to think of Sargent not only as a painter, but as the maker of human documents--like Balzac, the creator of imperishable characters--with this advantage over Balzac, that all his characters have especially sat to him. It is how posterity will undoubtedly regard this array of brilliant pictures. Of the people they will know nothing but the legend of their actions and Sargent's record of their face. We have undoubtedly felt that when a man of real distinction of mind has worn them, the top hat and cylindrical trouser leg were not so bad. They have indeed, under the influence of personality, seemed on occasions the most august and distinguished garments in the world. But there must come disillusion, the humour of it all will some day dawn, but it will not be before a Sargent picture. He has at any rate immortalised those things, just as Velazquez has made beautiful for ever the outrageous clothes in which his Infantas were imprisoned. We are reconciled to such things in art by the same process as we are in life, in Sargent's case by the unforgettable rendering of the distinction of many of his sitters.

X

It is the work of the secondary artist that is always perfect--of its sort; for it will not accept its reward, to wit, the finished picture, until the last effort has been expended. With the masters of the first order, it is otherwise. We have said they paint as they think; who but the amateur always thinks at his best? When a man's art has become a part of him, it suffers with his moods. He always works, and his work is always his companion, an indulgence. In his exalted moments it rises to heights by which we estimate his genius, but which sensible criticism does not expect him to live up to, any more than we expect a brilliant conversationalist always to be equally brilliant. This is why a master's work is always so interesting. That it has become so flexible an expression of his own nature is its charm, if we really regard it as art, and do not look upon the artist as a manufacturer who must be reliable, who having once turned out of his workshop a work of surpassing perfection, must be expected to keep to that standard or be classed with the defaulting tradesman whose goods do not come up to his sample. A painter makes or mars his own reputation by the care or carelessness of his work, but it is his own work, and he is not under any obligation to us to keep it up to a certain standard if it does not interest him to sacrifice everything for that standard. Sargent's work has been splendidly unequal. Sometimes it has been disillusioned, tired, at other times all his energy has seemed gathered up into a _tour de force_. An intensity there is about Sargent's earlier work which we cannot find in some of his later pictures, sureness of itself has brought freedom and with it freedom's qualities, which we must take pleasure in for their own sake.

It is frequently enough the weakness of painters to return constantly in their art to some particular gesture or arrangement in which their mastery is complete. This has not been the case with Sargent; instead, his mastery has completed itself only through a constant encounter with new difficulties.

A quality of all great art is reticence, something which will never let the master, to whom it is not disastrous to be careless, be so; for carelessness nearly always means over-statement, and exaggeration. Ah! just the qualities if a work of art is to arrest attention in a modern exhibition. A common question at the Royal Academy is "Where are the Sargents?" by some enthusiastic visitor who has passed them several times. No, Sargent's victories do not startle, winged victories do not, but advertisements do.

XI

Sargent was born of American parents in Florence in 1856, and passed his boyhood there. No art, it would seem at first, is further away than his from all the Florentine traditions, and yet in the decorative colour values, which give distinction to his finest works, he is the child of Florence. The Renaissance attitude towards life itself was highly imaginative, so into visionary art reality was carried. Consulting the origin of all their visions, the Florentines returned imaginatively to what was real. It is the beauty of reality which is the fervour of their great designs, and as a humanist, Sargent is their descendant.