John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 3

"Breakfast in the Loggia" by John Singer Sargent

"In Rome (1868-69), John Singer Sargent's parents kept a white-capped chef and gave dinner parties with ices. For it would happen that when myself and protecting housemaid had clambered up the 200 steps leading from our Piazza Mignelli to the one-storeyed and many-windowed house, hired for the winter by John and Emily's parents, I would meet cabs and vetture di rimessa, drawn up outside, and we children would eat downstairs while the dinner party above sent us down its sumptuous broken victuals. 

Meanwhile, in the drawing room, where the cupola of St. Peter's looked straight in at the windows for all the world like its sunset effigy on the lampshades we tried to imitate, in the drawing room, between the marble busts of George Washington and of the goddess Isis, there were being entertained some of those legendary artists: Harriet Hosmer, Randolph Roger, W.W. Story, and so forth, were having coffee upstairs, with a due proportion of painters almost as crimson and gold as those lampshades.

And to these now long-forgotten immortals, Mrs. Sargent would occasionally display the sketches which her boy had made (using the maternal paint box) when she sat on her campstool on some Roman villa terrace or before some sunset-flushed broken arches of an aqueduct. Of course the boy would never be more than an amateur, since he was, you know, going into the U.S. Navy. But for an amateur surely not without promise?

I then saw clearly dear, eloquent, rubicund, exuberant Mrs. Sargent, exhibiting those sketches not without wistful glances. And, on the other side, Dr. Sargent, a little averted, or, at most, with some curt glance or word expressing his estimation of that small boy's futile talent; and, to anyone who could take his meaning, his repulsion from all this art, this expatriated fooling with paints and clay and all this doubtful world of marble fauns and spurious romance when there, out there, was the real, manly romance of the high seas - a vocation from which he himself, possibly for health reasons, had been thwarted."

To be continued

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