 |
"Helen Bigelow Merriman" by Cecilia Beaux
|
Cecilia Beaux wrote: "The time came when the next opening was ready for me and I for it. I had one acquaintance who began seriously to turn toward painting. She organized a class and took a studio. She had none of my limitations in the way of 'ways and means.' She asked me to join the class. We were to work from a model three mornings in the week, and an artist, Mr. William Sartain, had consented to come over from New York once every fortnight to criticize us. My uncle with his usual generosity paid my share in the cost.
How far he was from the type generally described by story writers! He was a middle-sized man, firmly built, with a strong intellectual head. He was slightly bald and wore a short dark beard. He had been in Munich with Frank Duveneck as a student, and had then passed to long sojourns in Paris. The Romantic School had left its charming memory upon him.
 |
| William Sartain in his studio |
What I most remember was the revelation his vision gave me of the model. What he saw was there, but I had not observed it. His voice warmed with the perception of tones of color in the modeling of cheek and jaw in the subject, and he always insisted upon the proportions of the head, the summing up of the measure of the individual. This ideal, the difficult to attain in portraiture, is hidden in the large illusive forms. The stronger the head, the less obvious are these, and calling for perception and understanding in their farthest capacity.
When Mr. Sartain rose from my place after a critique and passed on, he left me full of strength to spend on the search, and joy in the beauty revealed. What I had felt before in the works of the great, unknown and remote, now could pass, by my own heart and hands, into the beginning of conquest, the bending of the material to my desire."
To be continued
(Excerpts from Cecilia Beaux's autobiography "Background with Figures." The photo of William Sartain is from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.)
No comments:
Post a Comment