 |
Sargent Painting Mrs. Fiske
Warren
and Her Daughter Rachel (painting below) |
Recently there was a question wondering what R.H. Ives Gammell thought about John Singer Sargent. One of the artists involved, Tom Dunlay (who studied with Gammell for 8 years), shared the answer by sending me
The Enigma of John Sargent's Art, and I thought that you might like to read it. Mr. Gammell's hypothesis focuses on what it was that motivated JSS to create his finest work.
The Enigma of John Sargent's Art
by R.H. Ives Gammell
"In the course of his working life John Sargent
devoted his energies to several kinds of painting. He painted portraits
and figure pieces and mural decorations. He sketched all sorts of
subjects in watercolors and in oils. He devoted some of his time to
sculpture and not a little of it to designing textiles. He made portrait
studies in charcoal. Though he took up these various activities at
widely separated periods of his existence it is notable that, generally
speaking, his earliest productions in each of these several fields
remained superior to anything he subsequently produced in the same form.
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Mrs. Fiske-Warren and Her
Daughter, Rachel |
The
work of no other eminent painter falls into a similar pattern. Pictures
painted in the later years of an artist's career often show a decline
due to physiological changes or to illness. Some painters, overwhelmed
by the press of orders, have entrusted the execution of their pictures
to assistants, with unfortunate results. Some have been spoiled by
success. Others have prostituted their talents for the sake of gain. In
Sargent's case none of these causes were operative.
Throughout
his life the sincerity and humility of his attitude toward painting was
recognized as one of his outstanding characteristics. He was never much
interested in financial gain. Except when painting portraits, he chose
his own subject matter and worked on his own time schedule. His
faculties continued to be unimpaired until the day of his death and his
physical strength declined far less than that of most men.
The baffling
thing about Sargent as an artist is that we can discern no completely
dominant motive behind his urge to paint.
- His was not an art of
self-expression, as was that of a Delacroix, of a Puvis de Chavannes, or
a Burne-Jones, for instance.
- Nor was it in essence an art of
conviction, dedicated to an ideal principle of interpretation and
workmanship, as we recognize the art of Manet, of Degas, or of Whistler
to have been. Sargent's approach was akin to that of these last-named
men, but his fidelity to a particular concept of painting was less
complete and uncompromising than theirs.
It was precisely this absence
of a deeply felt guiding principle which puzzled the serious artists of
his time and kept them from giving their wholehearted admiration to the
work of a man whose great talent and obvious sincerity they could not
fail to recognize.
* (see note below)
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| Boston Public Library Mural of Prophets |
The first murals seemed to herald
the development of something resembling an art of self-expression but
the promise was not fulfilled by the later decorations. Only a few of
Sargent's canvases, and all of those were painted early in his career,
achieve the full dignity of great impressionist art. The majority of his
pictures are apt to suggest a disinterested display of virtuosity
rather than devotion to a high artistic ideal. If, after studying
Sargent's mural decorations, we re-examine his output as a whole we may
feel justified in hazarding an analysis of his elusive personality.
Everything
we know of his working procedures indicates that Sargent's creative
thinking took place in his subconscious mind to an extent very unusual
in a painter who has proved himself capable of acquiring a high degree
of professional skill. Subconscious mental activity does play an
important role in all artistic creation, of course. It is, however,
characteristic of the art of painting that, once an idea has been
conceived and its general orientation has been established, translating
that idea into effective pictorial terms requires very clear thinking
and the judicious application of much acquired knowledge. In Sargent's
case an unusually large part of these later operations seems to have
been worked out in the earlier subconscious processes. To a bystander,
and quite possibly to Sargent himself, his pictures may have appeared to
take shape spontaneously in very nearly their final form. The gropings
and the experimental studies whereby artists ordinarily arrive at their
final results are relatively rare in Sargent's work. When he made a
failure it was a poor picture from the start and it remained so. The
tricks of patching and altering or of reconstructing an unsuccessful
composition, which most painters consider an indispensable element of
their craft, were apparently scarcely known to him. He seemed incapable
of telling anyone how he had arrived at a given result. He presumably
was only vaguely aware of it himself. The necessary brain work had been
largely subconscious, or so rapid that the artist appeared to have been
guided by instinct rather than by reasoning. A painter able to work in
this fashion often seems to have no very clear idea of what he is trying
to do because it has never been necessary for him to formulate his aims
to himself.
When this kind of mental activity is
basically responsible for the quality of a work of art, the artist can do
comparatively little to control it. He can toil assiduously, of course,
as Sargent certainly did. But his work will only reflect the full
measure of his capacity when the faculties dormant in his subconscious
are aroused to their maximum activity. At other times his painting will
tend to be a routine version of what he produced in his "inspired"
moments. An artist of this type probably has very little idea of how his
mind functions. He simply goes on painting as best he can until some
external stimulus awakens the forces of his psychic being to intense
creative activity. Only at such times is he likely to produce his finest
work.
If we feel justified in assuming that John
Sargent's psychic mechanism conformed to some pattern of this kind we
naturally will wish to ascertain what sort of stimulus served to set it
in motion.
In this connection a comment made to me by his niece comes to
my mind. It seemed to her that her uncle was attracted to his chosen
subject matter by virtue of the very difficulties which it presented to
him as a painter. And here we perhaps have the key to the riddle.
Apparently something in Sargent's inner nature responded in an unusual
degree to the challenge of an exceptionally difficult technical problem.
The challenge aroused no mere impulse to demonstrate his skill, as it
might have in a lesser nature. In Sargent's case it seems on occasion
rather to have engendered a series of reactions involving all the
resources of his extraordinarily gifted personality, focusing their
activity on the problem in hand and releasing emotional drives usually
quiescent. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the subconscious of this
reserved, inexpressive man, whose emotional life seems never to have
found an outlet in any personal relationship, was dominated by an
exceptionally powerful compensatory urge to assert his superiority? A
peculiarity of his nature made it extremely difficult for him to express
himself in speech or action and whenever possible he evaded occasions
for so doing. In this he was aided by circumstances, for he received as
his birthright many things which most men obtain only with effort:
education, financial independence, and access to the most desirable
society. His cosmopolitan existence released him from the duties of
citizenship, and he never assumed the responsibilities of family life.
His inability to deal with practical matters was proverbial. Serious
illness and love passed him by. He even lacked the capacity for
vicarious experience which ordinarily marks the creative artist.
Had he
not painted. John Sargent would have passed for an amiable, cultivated
though colorless man of the world. But he happened to be endowed with a
prodigious talent for painting, coupled with an exceptional receptivity
to art. literature, and music. All his other-wise unexpended energies
were concentrated on the exercise of this dual gift.
No
painter can have practiced his own art more constantly than did
Sargent, and he found his relaxation chiefly in music, in reading, and
in looking at works of art. His extraordinary talent, developed by
ceaseless industry and tempered by continuous contact with the best that
the human mind has produced, kept his work on a high artistic level at
most times.
But Sargent attained his maximum potential, as it would
seem, only when his subconscious will to power was aroused by an
opportunity to assert his superiority through his art. The challenge of a
fresh and exceptionally difficult artistic problem apparently induced a
catalysis whereby all the latent forces of his immensely gifted
personality and the accumulated store of his impressions merged into a
single creative effort.
Let us glance briefly at the record.
- The
admirable portrait of Carolus-Duran (1877). executed by a young man of
twenty-one under the critical eye of his master whose presence obviously
put the boy on his mettle, is almost as fine in workmanship as anything
he was later to paint.
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| Portrait of Carolus-Duran |
- Two
years afterwards came the spectacular El Jaleo (1881), a tour de force
if ever a picture was, which, in spite of certain defects of drawing
apparent in the secondary figures, might perhaps be taken as the most
complete expression of his characteristic qualities that Sargent ever
achieved.
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| El Jaleo |
- In the following year (1882) he painted the lovely
Lady With A Rose and finished the Boit Children, a composition in which
the difficulties always attending on the painting of children were
compounded by problems of rendering light and atmosphere on a vast
scale. Faced with this inordinately difficult subject which inevitably
evoked comparisons with Velasquez' Las Meninas. Sargent created a
masterpiece.
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| The Daughters of Edward D. Boit |
- It was
followed by the portrait of Madame Gautreau (1884). The difficulties
presented by this portrait were no less real, though they are less
obvious. The subject was a conspicuous "beauty" of the time, very much
in the public eye. and an uncooperative sitter. Hers was a singular type
of beauty, emphasized by makeup, which even a slight exaggeration or
understatement of form could turn into ugliness. As was his way, Sargent
made things harder by electing to paint the lady in an attitude
suggesting arrested motion. Once again he was triumphantly successful.
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| Madame X |
The
four last-named pictures belong in the great line of impressionist
painting, each one in its particular way on a level which Sargent never
quite reached again. When he finished Madame Gautreau, he was
twenty-eight years old.
Almost immediately an entirely
new set of pictorial problems gave a fresh impetus to his creative
activity. At this epoch painters were increasingly preoccupied by the
problems of plein-air painting, the chief of which consisted in making
accurate color notations of the transient effects created by
ever-changing light and weather out of doors. Once more we find Sargent
attacking a new problem in its most complex form, heaping Ossa upon
Pelion to increase the obstacles he proposed to surmount. He chose the
most illusive lighting conceivable, the brief moment of twilight between
sundown and dusk. He created an additional complication by introducing
the artificial light of candles seen through Japanese paper-lanterns.
Again he took children for his models, dressing them in white frocks
which assumed hues of exceptional delicacy in the gloaming. He
surrounded these young models with flowers whose shapes and colors were
scarcely less elusive than those of the children themselves. The result
was
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1886), a picture unique in the vast
output of nineteenth-century plein-air painting. Sargent never again
attempted anything of this kind.
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| Painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose |
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| Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose |
The
particular qualities which make these pictures great do not recur in
Sargent's subsequent work in a comparable degree. The portraits painted
during the next twelve years included some of his most brilliant
achievements. Remarkable as they are in characterization and in
handling, and occasionally as pictures, even the best of them somehow
fall short of being classed with the world's greatest portraits. Whereas
the best canvases of the eighties elicited comparisons with Velasquez
and Hals, the portraits of the nineties were more often praised for
being superior to Boldini's and Laszlo's or as perhaps rivaling those of
Sir Thomas Lawrence.
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The Duke of Portland
and his collies
1901 |
|
|
We still find Sargent seeking
difficulties as if they provided a dram for his genius. He sets the Duke
of Portland to playing with his collies, paints Mrs. George Batten in
the act of singing a song, groups Mrs. Carl Meyer and Mrs. Edgar L.
Davis in complicated attitudes with their restless children. The results
are amazing and exciting but in some ways less satisfying than many
portraits by far less gifted men. After the turn of the century
Sargent's portraits rarely reach the level established earlier by his
own best work.
Between 1890 and 1904 mural decoration
provided Sargent with another artistic adventure capable of drawing out
all his latent capabilities. He responded to this fresh challenge in the
two great lunettes at the Public Library, in the frieze of the
prophets, and in the Astarte. The new problems brought into play
previously untapped resources of his imagination and of his literary
background, enabling Sargent to create masterpieces fully as remarkable
in their way as his finest achievements in the field of impressionist
painting. From then on it is disappointing to follow the progressive
decline of his later mural work which reaches its lowest point in one of
the Widener Library panels.
Boston Library Murals
About
1906 Sargent began exhibiting watercolors. and during the following
decade his most brilliant work was done in that refractory medium. It
is, in point of fact, the most difficult and unmanageable of all mediums
for an artist bent on precise color-notation. Sargent rapidly made it
his own, becoming almost immediately the most accomplished watercolorist
which the world has yet seen. We find him successfully rendering
subjects that would baffle the skill of almost any other painter even in
the less difficult medium of oil: linen hung out to dry in flickering
sunlight, white marble buildings silhouetted against white clouds,
ladies resting on windswept hilltops, oxen and donkeys and alligators.
Many observers have thought that the watercolors painted in the first
decade of the century were his best, but he continued to turn them out
until the end of his life with little apparent decline, perhaps because
by their very nature they made few demands on his inner being. In this
art everything depended on sheer dexterity and brilliance on "making the
most of an emergency," as he himself defined painting a watercolor.
With the phrase he consciously gave the best characterization of his
entire approach to art.
He loved to make the most of an emergency and the greater the emergency,
the more he was usually able to make of it.
My
interpretation may answer another question frequently raised in
connection with John Sargent. Why did this brilliant, many faceted
artist continue for so long to accept portrait orders? By the early
nineties he had accumulated a considerable fortune and enjoyed
international celebrity. The professional portrait painter's task is
notoriously exhausting, frustrating, and thankless. Sargent himself
complained of it to his friends. 1 had it from a man who in his youth
had consulted Sargent as to whether he should take up painting, that the
most sought after painter in the world adjured him to avoid
portraiture. "It ruined me," said John Sargent. Why then did he go on
for another decade accepting orders from all and sundry? Because,
perhaps, each unknown, unsolicited sitter presented the fresh challenge
which his nature required, an unexpected, unpredictable artistic problem
demanding a solution.
This brief review of Sargent's
career would seem to lend considerable support to the hypothesis I have
outlined above. More than a hypothesis such an analysis could not
pretend to be. Any attempt to describe the creative processes of a great
artist is useful only insofar as it may help to understand and
appreciate the artist's work. The art of John Sargent has puzzled both
his admirers and those to whom it makes no appeal. Even the most
appreciative have realized that it was strangely lacking in some
fundamental quality of feeling. But this deficiency, which may perhaps
be attributed, as I have suggested, to the emotional poverty of
Sargent's initial creative impulse, should certainly not cause us to
undervalue the intellectual power and technical brilliance of the
resulting art or to doubt the sincerity of the artist.
Gustave
Flaubert maintained that an artist, to achieve lasting fame, needs must
either chisel a Parthenon or amass a pyramid. John Sargent stands with
the pyramid builders. Perhaps no painter of comparable artistic stature
has ever, unaided by assistants, been as prolific. The magnitude and
variety of his output staggers the mind. The two outstanding
characteristics of his art are vitality and a certain element of
surprise. While the pervading sense of life captured at full swing still
animates the best murals, canvases, water colors, and drawings,
familiarity has perhaps dulled our appreciation of what were once
startlingly novel presentations of familiar subjects which amazed and
some-times shocked his public. To take the full measure of Sargent's
originality one must restudy the art of his own time whose wilder
manifestations look more and more like the eccentricities of minor
artists hampered by their inadequate technical command. Sargent both
knew his trade and kept to the main line of the western tradition, but
his originality is manifested in everything he did. His work was uneven
in quality, no doubt. His splendid contribution may be likened to that
of a torrent which gushes headlong down the mountainside bearing,
together with minerals of lesser value, nuggets of the purest gold."
~ R.H. Ives Gammell in Classical America
* Sir William Rothenstein, who was on friendly terms with the leading English and French artists of the period, wrote: "We all acknowledged his (Sargent's) immense accomplishment as a painter to be far beyond anything of which we were capable. But the disparity between his gifts and our own we were inclined to discount by thinking that we had qualities which somehow placed us among the essential artists while he, in spite of his great gifts, remained outside the charmed circle. I was used to hearing both Whistle and Degas speak disparagingly of Sargent's work. Even Helleu, Boldini and Gandar regarded him more as a brilliant executant than as an artist of high rank."
Links
The Boston Library, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Harvard University murals: http://www.sargentmurals.bpl.org/
Excellent website of Sargent's work: http://www.jssgallery.org
