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| "Charles Martin Loeffler (detail)" by John Singer Sargent |
As he painted it, the mouth bloomed out of the face, an integral part of it, not, as in the great majority of portraits, painted on it, a separate thing. He showed how much could be expressed in painting the form of the brow, the cheekbones, and the moving muscles around the eyes and mouth, where the character betrayed itself most readily; and under his hands, a head would be an amazing likeness long before he had so much as indicated the features themselves. In fact, it seemed to me the mouth and nose just happened with the modelling of the cheeks, and one eye, living, luminous, had been placed in the socket so carefully prepared for it (like a poached egg dropped on a plate, he described the process).
When a clock in the neighborhood struck, Mr. Sargent was suddenly reminded that he had a late appointment with a sitter. In his absorption he had quite forgotten it. He hated to leave the canvas. 'If only one had oneself under perfect control,' he once said to me, 'one could always paint a thing, finally in one sitting.' (Now and then he accomplished this.) 'Not that you are to attempt this,' he admonished me, 'if you work on a head for a week without indicating the features you will have learnt something about the modelling of the head.'
Every brush stroke while he painted had modelled the head of further simplified it. He was careful to insist that there were many roads to Rome, that beautiful painting would be the result of any method or no method, but he was convinced that by the method he advocated, and followed all his life, a freedom could be acquired, a technical mastery that left the mind at liberty to concentrate on a deeper of more subtle expression."
To be continued
(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)
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