An elusive sitter
John Jolliffe
JOHN SINGER SARGENT: HIS PORTRAIT by Stanley Olson
Macmillan, £16.95
Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. His parents, who came from Philadelphia, had settled down to a completely futile, nomadic existence in Europe, theoretically for the sake of Mrs Sargent's health, though her husband was a competent doctor and there doesn't seem to have been anything wrong with her beyond a general malaise brought on partly by the death of her, eldest child and partly by an arbitrary determination to have nothing whatever to do with her in-laws back home. Their way of life left them without either occupation or friends, but their son was an energetic, boisterous child, and at least they had the sense to encourage his early skill in drawing and painting.
Sargent grew up in the strange, itinerant vacuum that his parents had created, until the age of 18 when their dithering suddenly ended. They settled in Paris and enrolled him in the studio of Carolus-Duran, a mediocre painter but for 20 years a very fashionable one. He was an excellent teacher, and very much liked by his pupils.
The basis of the technique which he taught was later described by Sargent as 'begin- ning with the half-tones of a composition and gradually progressing to the highest lights and darkest darks', thereby 'avoiding false accents'. This method became of the greatest value to Sargent, even though his teacher could not practice it himself, perhaps, as the author suggests, 'the final proof of a great teacher'.
In the first settled surroundings that he had ever known, Sargent worked extreme- ly hard. Good-natured and generous, though always reserved, he became enor- mously popular, but not at the expense of his industry. His confidence grew quickly, and by 1882 his success had reached heights 'unknown to a foreigner working in Paris'. Setbacks followed, and when he moved to London in 1885 the art world was not at once receptive, but many doors were helpfully opened for him by Henry James, who prized him very highly, and he soon joined a large and exuberant artistic colony at Broadway in Worcestershire. The fol- lowing year he acquired Whistler's old studio in Tite Street, Chelsea, which re- mained his base for the rest of his life. In 1888 he made a triumphant visit to Boston and New York, and established lasting good relations with the great collector Mrs Isabella Stewart Gardner.
Thereafter he was constantly in demand for portraits, until by 1908 he could bear it no longer, and wrote to Lady Radnor, `Ask me to paint your gates, your fences, your barns, which I should gladly do, but not the human face'. He was also extremely musical. His gifts as a pianist are alleged to have caused the great violinist Joachim to say that had he taken to music instead of painting, he would have been as great a musician as he was a painter. He was certainly very active and generous in help- ing unknown composers to get their works performed, in particular Faure and Percy Grainger.
Apart from a very mild flirtation in his youth with a girl called Louise Burckhardt (largely brought on by her mother) his emotional life seems to have been a void. He was the greatly admired friend of Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ellen Terry and Vernon Lee, among many others, but there is nowhere the faintest trace of a real love affair in his whole life. Stanley Olson is much to be praised for not only facing this fact but also for not speculating tediously about it, as many biographers would have done.
Roger Fry, who had previously praised Sargent in print, waited till after his death in 1925 before roundly condemning him for the 'uniform superficiality of his observa- tion'. Was this charge justified? This book is not the place to find the answer to the question, and for all the author's great merits in gathering together the facts about his subject and weaving them into a narra- tive that is almost always effective, though here and there a little strained, his verdict is non-committal, though he is surely right in accusing Sargent of a lack of imagina- tion. (Max Beerbohm, incidentally, refer- red to him as 'the most sensitive and correct of men'.) It does not matter if a biographer sits on the fence when the subject is a man of action, whose deeds and their effects can be judged independently; but when it is an artist whose works are scattered far and wide, the only way to make up one's mind is by going to see them for oneself. For that, the indispensible point of departure is the volume of plates, admirably edited by Sargent's great- nephew Richard Ormond and published by Phaidon in 1970.
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