John Singer Sargent: In Memoriam, Pt. 6

Detail of "Thomas McKeller" by John Singer Sargent

"John Sargent extracted and made visible the actual beauty of the world; and never so much as in the innumerable oil sketches and watercolors which make him one of the greatest of landscape painters. But I want to close on another note.

More and more it has seemed to me that Sargent's life was absorbed in his painting, and the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be: 'He painted.' To some of us he seemed occasionally to paint to the exclusion of living. In latter years he seemed to be painting from morning till night, an easel, more than metaphorically, in every  corner, a picture under way for every effect of changing weather. 

But looking over the portfolios and portfolios of sketches, thinking of all the more elaborated landscapes: Venice, Carrara Quarries, Alps, Architecture, and even such things as some divinely exquisite silvery wooden paling against a green Tyrolese meadow, I recognize that his life was not merely in painting, but in the more and more intimate understanding and enjoying the world around him, and which the work of his incomparable hand enables some of us, also, to understand and enjoy, if only in part.

As regards our friendship, I have sometimes regretted that, having started with such early intimacy, I did not get, or try, to know John Sargent better. But, after all, what can be better than knowing a great man, not in the details of his common personal existence, but in the impersonal feelings and thoughts special to his greatness, and which he enabled us to share with him?"

Vernon Lee

Oxford, August 13th, XXV.

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