T. Martin Wood

“ 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. ”

“ 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 the very 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ V 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, [pg 38] 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. ”

“ Fame has not spoilt his retiring nature, and even by his art a barrier is raised, in front of which the master will not show himself, but I hope it is an intimacy that we have established with him in his art. Mine is but the privilege of murmuring the introduction, and any charges to be brought against me must be laid at Sargent's door. For a great artist creates not only his art, but that which it inspires. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [pg 52] 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. ”

“ 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, [pg 71] must be expected to keep to that standard or be classed with the defaulting tradesman whose goods do not come up to his sample. ”

“ 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 [pg 42] 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. ”

“ They worked within a convention narrower than Sargent's, compromising with nature at the [pg 41] 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. ”

“ Great tiger-lilies hang over the children. We almost expect in these surroundings [pg 30] 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. ”

“ 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. ”