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Harper's Magazine, Ocober,1887 (pp. 683-691)
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| "John S. Sargent" by Henry James
(Frontpage) (What's New) (Thumbnails) (Refer This Site) Harper's Magazine, Ocober,1887 (pp. 683-691) |
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JOHN
S. SARGENT.
689
performance shows what victories it
may achieve. And in relation to the latter I must repeat what I said about
the young
lady with the flower, that this is the sort of work which, when produced
in youth, leads the attentive spectator to ask unanswerable questions.
He finds himself murmuring, “Ay, but what is left?” and even wondering
whether it is an advantage to an artist to obtain early in life such possession
of his means that the struggle with them, the discipline of tatonnement,
ceases to exist for him. May not this breed an irresponsibility of cleverness,
a wantonness, an irreverence— what is vulgarly termed a “larkiness”— on
the part of the youthful genius who has, as it were, all his fortune in
his pocket? Such are the possibly superfluous broodings of those who are
critical, even in their warmest admirations, and who sometimes suspect
that it may be better for an artist to have a certain part of his property
invested in unsolved difficulties. When this is not the case, the question
with regard to his future simplifies itself somewhat portentously. “What
will he do with it?” we ask, meaning by the pronoun the sharp, completely
forged weapon. It becomes more purely a question of responsibility, and
we hold him altogether to a higher account. This is the case with Mr. Sargent;
he knows so much about the art of painting that he perhaps does not fear
emergencies quite enough, and that having knowledge to spare, he may be
tempted to play with it and waste it. Various, curious, as we have called
him, he occasionally tries experiments which seem to arise from the mere
high spirits of his brush, and runs risks little courted by the votaries
of the literal, who never expose their necks to escape from the common.
For the literal and the common he has the smallest taste when he renders
an object into the language of painting, his translation is a generous
paraphrase.
As I have intimated, he has painted
little but portraits; but he has painted very many of these, and I shall
not attempt in so few pages to give a catalogue of his works. Every canvas
that has come from his hands has not figured at the Salon; some of them
have seen the light at other exhibitions in Paris; some of them in London
(of which city Mr. Sargent is now an inhabitant), at the Royal Academy
and the Grosvenor Gallery. If he has been mainly represented by portraits,
there are two or three little subject-pictures of which I retain a grateful
memory. There stands out in particular, as a pure gem, a small picture
exhibited at the Grosvenor, representing a small group of Venetian girls
of the lower class, sitting in gossip together one summer’s day in the
big, dim hall of a shabby old palazzo [Venetian
Interior]. The shutters let in a clink of light; the scagliola
pavement gleams faintly in it; the whole place is bathed in a kind of transparent
shade; the tone of the picture is dark and cool. The girls are vaguely
engaged in some very humble household work; they are counting turnips or
stringing onions, and these small vegetables, enchantingly painted, look
as valuable as magnified pearls. The figures are extraordinarily natural
and vivid; wonderfully light and fine is the touch by which the painter
evokes all the small familiar Venetian realities (he has handled them with
a vigor altogether peculiar in various other studies which I have not space
to enumerate [Venetian
Studies]), and keeps the whole thing free from that element of humbug
which has ever attended most attempts to reproduce the Italian picturesque.
I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks without having mentioned
a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field of portraiture with which
Mr. Sargent’s name is preponderantly associated. I jumped from his Carolus
Duran to the masterpiece of 1881 without speaking of the charming “Madame
Pailleron” of 1879, or the picture of this lady’s
children the following year. Many, or rather most, of Mr. Sargent’s
sitters have been French, and he has studied the physiognomy of this nation
so attentively that a little of it perhaps remains in the brush with which
to-day, more than in his first years, he represents other types. I have
alluded to his superb “Docteur
Pozzi,” to whose very handsome, still youthful head and slightly artificial
posture he has given so fine a French cast that he might be excused if
he should, even on remoter pretexts, find himself reverting to it. This
gentleman stands up in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the prestance
of certain figures of Vandyck. I should like to commemorate the portrait
of a lady of a certain age, and of an equally certain interest of appearance—a
lady in black, with black hair, a black hat, and a vast feather, which
was displayed at that en-
Note: |
Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt)
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By: Natasha
Wallace
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