Cecilia Beaux, A Tribute to John Singer Sargent

"Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel"
by John Singer Sargent

When John Singer Sargent died in 1925, Cecilia Beaux was chosen, along with several other artists, to give a tribute to him which had been organized by the "Contemporary Club" in Philadelphia. She referred to his swiftness of execution, his technique, his power of expression, and originality. Speaking of the latter she said:

"Rarity, subtlety, originality, often splendor, lay like an aura around what Sargent saw. His eye would have it that way and no other. So that the whole of life was to him an entrancing spectacle from which one chose the most magical passages... All this with grand indifference to all but the essential charm, and treated summarily in good earnest.

Sargent seems to have believed that nothing purely material, even fabrics - in themselves a fine art - have any right to existence in painting except as revelations in flight. Since they must have existence and body, (and he did not wish it otherwise) they must appear in a beauty truly sensuous and moving, be they great folds of satin, films of gauze, or the patine on a piece of old furniture, or brass, or faded gold, and no one has ever known better how to eliminate the importance of THINGS, while at the same time presenting them as a force truly dynamic, in painting."

She concluded her tribute with this poem, a dirge, which she had written.

Sargent: A Dirge
by Cecilia Beaux

Fallen is the tree:
Its great branches crashing;
Empty its wide space upon the sky.
Low upon the ground
Are the leaflets of its crest,
Proud, that knew the upper air.

Fallen is the Chief:
Princes, lay the purple robe upon him -
Purple as the wine,
Ruddy as the fruit,
Yellow as the corn,
He gave to all, generously bestowing.

Death has conquered now,
In the night softly lurking;
Sapped the bold eye's magic,
And the swift hand's daring;
Quenched the beacon flame,
Quenched the Fount majestic,
Darkened sky and thirsty land.

Come, ye pallid starvlings
Nature's unendowed.
Here the banquet waits,
Envy shrinks away,
Take, and satisfy,
Parched soul, and withered eye.

Death is captive here,
Where the heaped-up treasure gleams.
Labor's dower to the ages,
Fruit of travail,
Strong creation's urge.
Here's abundance,
Come, ye People - feast and mourn.