John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 5

"Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice"
by John Singer Sargent

"This legend of John Singer Sargent and his father is, properly, all I [Vernon Lee] have to tell about him. For our real intimacy did not last beyond those years of our childhood which good fortune gave us in each other's company in Rome. While my people returned to Rome for another four or five years, John Sargent's family, perhaps for the sake of a very good boys' school, settled in Florence. And when circumstances drifted us also to Florence in 1873, Dr. and Mrs. Sargent, with Emily and an additional little daughter, had settled once more at Nice. So our meetings became rare and brief.

As happens (or happened in those distant more conservative times) once friends always friends. We corresponded more or less regularly, John and Emily and I. Indeed, I confess that my belief that John Sargent was going to be the great painter of the future, a belief whose realization was later to surprise me as a wonderful coincidence, was at bottom due to a general faith that everyone connected with myself must partake in the glory of my secret adolescent daydreams.

During one brief meeting on the Lake of Como - we were respectively fourteen and thirteen - we picked up figs which had dropped over villa walls, while continuing our discussion on the merits of Canova versus the Antique and Guido Reni compared with Rafael. At another time Mrs. Sargent, my mother, John, Emily and myself rambled by moonlight through the mediaeval arcades and under the leaning towers and crenellations of Florence. Of a morning, we would spend hours over portfolios of prints and the unreadable scores of the music school. He readily set to copying some marvellously hideous portraits of the musicians, so that I still cherish a careful watercolor of a youthful portrait of Mozart.

By the time I was a half-baked polyglot scribbler of sixteen, and John a year older: a tall, slack, growing youth with as yet no sign of his later spick-and-span man-of-the-world appearance; did he not protect his rather stooping shoulders with a grey plaid shawl? ... He had very nearly completed his classical education in that Florence school and sundry German gymnasia, working hard, meanwhile, wherever there was an opportunity of drawing from the life or from casts: he was within a year or two of the promised initiation into Paris art schools and entire independence. Yet so great was his, I know not whether to call it modesty or reserve, that I cannot remember his ever mentioning his future. 

Indeed, as time interposed longer intervals between our meetings, and filled up the intervening absences more and more with interests unshared by the other, the word 'curious,' pronounced with a long and somehow aspirated 'u', became the keynote of John Sargent's and my conversation; the word representing a stereotyped reciprocal attitude such as often all that remains in the externally unchanged relations of once fraternal friends."

To be continued

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