John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 2

"Village Children" by John Singer Sargent

When Vernon Lee was twelve, as she recounts, "The Sargents began to play a dominant part in my life. We had moved into a gaunt house facing the sea and the sweep of the promenade des Anglais. Then was established a regular coming and going between us. Afternoons, moreover, were spent in painting.

I do not know whether at that time John Sargent yet possessed a paintbox of his own. He certainly used mine. And I feel sure that my perennial supplies of watercolors and porcelain palettes and albums of vario-tinted paper were what drew him to me; and that our fraternal friendship grew out of those afternoons of painting together. Together, in the sense that we consumed refreshments and paints in company, and conversed the while on elevated topics: I must have poured forth about the weekly nights in the family's box at the Nice opera, with vocal imitations, perhaps, of performers and discussion of the verisimilitudes in Verdi's and Donizetti's librettos. 

But never did John Sargent participate in my pictorial self-expression or show any interest therein. To him paints were not for the telling of stories. There were illustrated books and papers lying about, and a stretch of Mediterranean and perspectived houses and coastlines looked in at the windows, and to the reproduction of all these did John Sargent apply himself. - and with miraculous intuition and dexterity. 

I can see the clean juxtaposed blue and green of sky and waves, the splendid tossing lines of sea and ships, see even the bold pencil title in a clearer version of his grown-up writing, the title in a corner, 'U.S. Ship (name, alas, forgotten!) Chasing the Slaver 'Panther.' His sister, on my mentioning this work, suggests that he may have copied it from some 'Illustrated London News' or suchlike. But even if it was so copied, the rendering of the composition, the quality of the lines, above all, the fresh, slick color which he had added, made it into a free translation, indeed, a transfiguration. Thus did he already see in that marvellous mind's eye of his, the things presented by Nature, or by other of her interpreters. At Nice in 1867-68, John Sargent, in furtive use of his mother's paints or long afternoons with my preposterous and horribly messy boxes, was already a painter. In spirit and in fact."

To be continued

(Excerpts from Vernon Lee's "J.S.S.: In Memoriam.")