John Singer Sargent: Too Many Portraits

Max Beerbohm's Caricature of Sargent and His Sitters

"After the portrait of Miss Priestly, exhibited at the Academy in 1896, a steady stream of portraits issued from the studio in Tite Street. Max Beerbohm's caricature here represents Sargent, with dilated eye and a countenance slightly bucolic, at his window like a farmer taking stock of his cattle, and surveying the row of applicants drawn up in the street below. Among the fashionable ladies waiting their turn may be seen boy messengers sent on in advance to keep places in the ranks, where Lady Faudel Phillips and the Duchess of Sutherland are conspicuous. 

One of his sitters, a famous personage, asked if she could invite some of her friends to be present at a sitting. Sargent reluctantly assented. At three o'clock the door bell rang, and during the next half-hour the friends continued to arrive, all strangers to Sargent, mos of the curiously dressed representatives of the aesthetic movement then at its height. By three-thirty the studio was thronged with an excited concourse; every moment the hubbub increased. By degrees he was pressed against his easel, and the area in which he used to step back to get a better view of his sitter was block. The sitting had to be abandoned."

 To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)