Sargent's Life through his writing, paintings and drawings
Chapter VII
SARGENT'S picture En Route pour la Peche in the Salon of 1878, received "honourable mention." It was his second exhibited work. His age was twenty-two. In the autumn of 1878 he spent several weeks at Capri. From there he wrote to Ben Castillo:
Capri (paper),
Aug. 1878 (date added by Ben).
By this time I fancy the Latin Quarter is deserted of all our mutual friends and that you are rarely to be seen within its bounds. The week contains no more Friday afternoon.
I got a letter from Beckwith the other day which informed me of the movements of the different fellows. Why didn't you join them in their walking tour ? By the way I never saw the joke at all myself, but the question comes natural to me just now as I am inclined to think that companionship a great object. If it were not for one German staying at the Marina, I should be absolutely without society and he is in love and cannot talk about anything but his sweetheart's moral irreproachability. We are going over to Sorrento in a day or two to visit her, and I have agreed to keep her husband's interest rivetted to Vesuvius, Baiae, Pozzuoli and other places along the distant opposite shore.
Naples is simply superb and I spent a delightful week there. Of course it was very hot, and one generally feels used up. It is a fact that in Naples they eke out their wine with spirits and drugs, so that a glass of wine and water at a meal will make a man feel drunk. I had to take bad beer in order not to feel good-for-nothing. I could not sleep at night. In the afternoon I would smoke a cigarette in an arm- chair or on my bed and at five o'clock wake up suddenly from a deep sleep of several hours. Then lie awake all night and quarrel with mosquitoes, fleas and all imaginable beasts. I am frightfully bitten from head to foot. Otherwise Italy is all that one can dream for beauty and charm.
It is however true that the " Vandalia " is at Naples. Cap. Robson was very polite and asked me to lunch on board on Tuesday, but at lunch time I was sailing past the Vandalia's bows in the Capri market boat, packed in with a lot of vegetables and fruit. There is a steamer from Naples and Capri, but it has no particular day for going, so that if one comes to the quai of Sta. Lucia every morning as I did with one's luggage, one is sure of getting off in less than a week.
I am painting away very hard and shall be here a long time. So if you write soon, as I should like, address Capri otherwise P.R. Naples. With love to Mrs. Castillo and Wm. Durel.
Your affect, old friend,
John S. Sargent.
There were living on the island, besides the enamoured German, several French and three English artists, one of whom — Mr. Frank Hyde — had a studio in the old monastery of Santa Teresa. Mr. Hyde had never met Sargent and had never seen his work, but hearing that an American artist had arrived and was staying at one of the inns, he called and found him with no place to work in, but perfectly content and revelling in the beauty of the island. Mr. Hyde invited him to come and work at the monastery. There he provided him with a famous model called Rosina, "an Ana Capri girl, a magnificent type, about seventeen years of age, her complexion a rich nut-brown, with a mass of blue-black hair, very beautiful, and of an Arab type." Sargent made many studies from her, one of which, the property of Miss Sargent, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1926, and will be found reproduced opposite. During the remainder of his stay he resided at the Marina Hotel; here he imported a breath of the Latin Quarter, entertaining the artists on the island and organizing a fete in which the tarantella was danced on the flat roof of his hotel, to an orchestra of tambourines and guitars. But no entertainment in the Latin Quarter could compete with the figures of the dancers silhouetted against the violet darkness of the night under the broad illumination of the moon, the surrounding silence, the faint winds from the sea, and a supper when the stars are giving place before the first orange splash of day. Bonnet, Sain, Doucet, Chatrau, Frank Hyde and others were the guests of Sargent on that occasion.
Head of Ana Capri Girl
In 1879 he exhibited Dans les Olivier s Capri and Portrait de Carolus Duran. Dans les Oliviers was the replica of a picture he had already sold and sent to New York. The portrait of Duran is influenced more than most of his early pictures by the manner of Duran himself. Brown predominates, the tones are rather sharply contrasted, the treatment has less distinction than usual, is even not without a commonplace element; the guitarist, the dandy with elegant cuffs of ruffled lawn, the riding school and the fencing class, seem to be summarized in the rather florid and obvious model. It is the portrait of an eminently successful man, pleased with himself and perhaps not unaware that in posing to a pupil he was paying him a singular and liberal compliment. The picture seems to anticipate the comment made by Duran when someone congratulated him on his pupil's success: "Oui mais Papa etait la!" Though the portrait received no mark of Academic approval it was a popular picture and did a great deal to consolidate the painter's reputation in Paris. In 1879 he painted also Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight, Portrait of Robert de Civrieux with Dog and In the Luxembourg Gardens,
In the autumn he paid his second visit to Spain, in the company of two French painters, MM. Daux and Bac. The party rode through the Ronda Mountains to Gibraltar. Here, in addition to painting, he made researches into Spanish music and folk-songs, subjects in which he and Vernon Lee were alike interested. On his return to Paris he wrote to her:
You wished some Spanish songs. I could not find any good ones. The best are what one hears in Andalusia, the half African Melaguemas and Soleas, dismal, restless chants that it is impossible to note. They are something between a Hungarian czardas and the chant of the Italian peasant in the fields and are generally composed of five strophes and end stormily on the dominant, the theme quite lost in strange fioriture and guttural roulades. The gitano voices are marvellously subtle. If you have heard something of the kind you will not consider this mere jargon.
At his studio in Tite Street he used in later years to entertain himself and on occasions try to entertain his guests, or beguile the tedium of a sitting, with a gramophone and records of Spanish music. "That stuff," speaking of Spanish folk-songs, he said,* "is at the bottom of all good music." It may indeed be of interest to some to know the four pieces which he preferred, even sending for them from Boston in 191 6, so that Mrs. Gardner might have the benefit of them. They were:
Malaguemas Fandangerillo Catalan por Juan Breda. Malaguemas estito Juan de Mellizo por Juan Breda. Farrucae, cantada por la Nina de los Peinas por Juan Breda. Guillans cantados por Pavon.
In January, 1880, he paid his first visit to Morocco. From Tetuan he wrote to Ben Castillo:
Hotel Central,
Tangier,
Jan, 1880.
Unchanging friend and dauntless correspondent it is very creditable of you to have written to me after such a long hiatus. But instead of cursing so malignantly why don't you guess that I have been doing so much jogtrotting on atrocious horses and mules that I can't sit down to write, and that the temperature in these tropical regions is such that one's fingers refuse to hold the pen. This is an exaggeration.
The other day on a ride from Ceuta to Tetuan we essayed a most tremendous storm of hail and rain that made us shiver and set our half naked Arabs shaking in the most alarming way, but now the weather is beautiful and the temperature just what it ought to be. We have rented a little Moorish house (which we don't yet know from any other house in the town, the little white tortuous streets are so exactly alike) and we expect to enjoy a month or two in it very much. The patio open to the sky affords a studio light, and has the horseshoe arches arabesques, tiles and other traditional Moorish ornaments. The roof is a white terrace, one of the thousand that form this odd town, sloping down to the sea. All that has been written and painted about these African towns does not exaggerate the interest of at any rate, a first visit. Of course the poetic strain that writers launch forth in when they touch upon a certain degree of latitude and longitude — is to a great extent conventional; but certainly the aspect of the place is striking, the costume grand and the Arabs often magnificent.
* H. F. Stewart, " Memoirs of Francis Jenkinson," p. 80.
I regret the many months spent in Spain in the rain and had
weather that quite spoiled the trip as far as painting and enjoyment goes. When you carry out your plan of a visit to Spain, he sure to go in the spring; one loses too much by going there in December. Best love to your people, Your affectionate friend, John S. Sargent. This expedition to Spain and Morocco resulted in several of his well-known works —among them Fumee Ambre Gris, The Alhambra, The Court of the Lions, Spanish Beggar Girl, Spanish Courtyard, El Jaleo and the Spanish Dance, which, like so much of his early work, are now only to be seen in America. El Jaleo was subsequently bought by Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge, who told Mrs. Gardner that the picture should one day be hers. She had seen the picture at exhibitions, and satisfied herself that it would be shown to best advantage with the light coming from below. Anticipating the day when the picture would be hers, she built an alcove in her music-room at Fenway Court, framed in a Moorish arch, and along the floor arranged a row of electric lights which would reproduce, as far as possible, the conditions under which the picture had originally been painted. Mr. Coolidge, when he saw these preparations, accelerated his generous intentions and handed the picture over to be installed in this flattering environment.
Sargent was back in Paris in time to start with Helleu and Ralph Curtis for a tour in Holland, and to return before the opening of the Salon. It was his first opportunity of studying Franz Hals in his native country and in the fullness of his power. The impression was never forgotten. Indeed, Hals henceforward has to be reckoned as one of the formative constituents in his art. Many years later, to Miss Heyneman who was seeking advice from him, he said: "Begin with Franz Hals, copy and study Franz Hals, after that go to Madrid and copy Velasquez, leave Velasquez till you have got all you can out of Franz Hals."
Though preferences necessarily change in kind and degree and too much importance should not be attached to an artist's obiter dicta, it is of more than passing interest to note that once when discussing genius in painting he said that the four painters who in his opinion possessed it in a superlative degree were Rembrandt, Titian, Tintoretto and Raphael, and upon Velasquez being suggested, added that no painter exceeded Velasquez in technical skill, but that he was less gifted in his power to interpret "spiritual qualities."
While in Holland the party visited Scheveningen, and here Sargent did a sketch in oils of his friend Ralph Curtis, seated among the sand dunes. It is painted in a low key, soft in tone and delicate in colour, done obviously "au premier coup," and shows unmistakably that he was in these years inclining to the modern French school of painting.
In the same year, 1880, he exhibited at the Salon a portrait of Mme. E. Pailleron, the wife of the French author M. Edouard Pailleron and daughter of M. Buloz, then director of La Revue des Deux Monde s> also Fumee d'Ambre Gris y a study for which was shown at the Exhibition at the Royal Academy in January, 1926.
Chapter VIII
IN the late summer of 1880 Sargent went with his family to Venice to the Hotel d'ltalie, Piazza San Moise. After a few days he found a studio at the Palazzo Rezzonico, Grand Canal, in which several American and French artists were already installed. The Palazzo had become a sort of barrack for artists, with some of the amenities of a palace and the gaiety of the Latin Quarter. Here he worked during the remainder of his stay.
Tiepolo, whom he considered as the first of decorative artists, and Tintoretto were the painters whose works claimed his attention at this time. He was soon a well-known figure in Venice; daily he could be seen in a gondola, sketching with his sister Emily, herself an accomplished water-colourist, in one of the side canals, painting some architectural feature in the full glory of sun and shadow, or seated with his easel on one of the lesser piazzas making a study of a church facade, doorway, window, or of any one of the thousand effects which Venice offers in unique abundance. His art is seldom concerned with the actual life of the place, its people, its ceremonies or customs; what he sees is the Venice fashioned magically in stone, the glint on its waters, the reflections on its walls, its gondolas, the spars and sails of its shipping thrown against the background of a church, or its dazzling sky mirrored on the dancing facets of an agitated canal. He paints here, there and everywhere with a deliberate nonchalance in the choice of his topics, taking things as they come; discovering things as it were by accident, but seeing them with an intensely personal outlook, more nearly concerned, in fact, with how he sees and how he paints than with the associations of what he sees. In Spain he had been caught by the "spirit of place" and he had seemed for the time to enter into and become part of what was in its essence racial and bone of its bone. Spanish dancing had appealed to his love of the natural — to his pleasure in some- thing at once vivid, elementary and pictorial. The subject it- self had excited him with its grace and wildness, its colour and its attitudes. He had mixed with the people, not as a student observer, but on a basis of equality, catching the spirit and human significance of what he saw. But here in Venice it is as though he were setting out on the course he was to follow through his career; he is no longer interested in the people and their mode of life, his visual attention is absorbed by the surroundings in which they are merely negligible incidents. Henceforward it becomes more and more rare to find among his sketches any record of episodes characteristic of a people or a race or of the commerce of their daily lives; the vox populi seems to fall on deaf ears. But meanwhile he is shaping his own convention. He has his own individual way of looking at the world, and he is slave to no tradition. Problems of light and shadow were exercising the painters of the day in Paris, and in these he was experimenting, feeling his way to the solution which he ultimately evolved.
He stayed on in Venice through the late autumn, moving, when his family left, to 290, Piazza San Marco, All' Orologio, but retaining his studio at the Rezzonico. He exhibited at the Salon of 1 88 1 four portraits — namely, Portrait de M. R. S. and Portraits de M. E. P., and the portrait of Miss Burckhardt catalogued as Mile. L. P., and also known as The Lady with a Rose, of which Henry James wrote: "It offers the slightly uncanny spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn. . . . The picture has this sign of productions of the first order, that its style would clearly save it, if everything else should change — our measure of value of its resemblance, its expression of character, the fashion of dress, the particular associations it evokes." Few of Sargent's portraits have so summarized the spirit of youth; none, perhaps, has rendered so exquisitely its unfolding fancies and aspirations and its inexperience. Here is a picture in which temperament has played a part; it is something more than the intellectual conception of a great painter. The delicate modelling of the head, the freshness of the colouring, the half-tones of the flesh, the ease which the artist has imported into a pose which leans to the artificial, and the mastery shown in the painting of the dress, mark it out as one of his most distinctive achievements. It invites comparison with Duran's Lady with the Glove, and measures how far the pupil had advanced beyond the highest effort of his master.
In June, 1881, Sargent was writing from Paris to Castillo in a spirit of youthful elation:
Just a few frantic arabesques to acknowledge the receipt of your pleasant letters and communicate my plans. In the first place I have got a 2 ieme medaille at the Salon and am hors concours and a great swell. I accept your congratulations. It is for that portrait of a Chilian lady (Mme. R. S.) that I was painting last summer Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.
Later he was in London staying with Mr. Joseph Farquharson, R.A., in Porchester Gardens, "to paint two heads" and see his parents and sisters off to America. Back again at 73, Rue Notre Dame des Champs, he reports that he is "painting portraits and getting along very well with the Spanish dancers" {El Jaleo) the picture which was to be famous in the Salon of 1882, and for which he had made several studies when in Spain.
That summer he sent some sketches to Vernon Lee. They had arrived in some disorder.
As for the sketches (he wrote on receiving her acknowledgement) having arrived "en compote" I should think they could easily be cured by Heath Wilson, if he will take the trouble. I am convinced that the likeness of Miss Robinson is horrid and that she hates me and will never allow me to make amends. It is really hideous. Let Heath Wilson retouch it with a hot poker, and put an umbrella into it and open the umbrella. Your portrait might be varnished with light varnish. Verni Sochnee for instance. Don't let D or any of his boys varnish it: they have some wondrous prescription for making a picture blaze under a thick coat of enamel like a panel of a new carriage; "au surplus charmants garcons."
The letter which follows was written after reading Vernon Lee's volume of essays "Belcaro." In the essay "In Umbria" she had discussed the relation of an artist to his work. "Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature ? " was the question she propounded. Her answer had been very decidedly in the affirmative. She had attacked the doctrine of Ruskin and contended that artistic talent achieved its end independently of creed or sentiment — a theme which she had illustrated by the case of Perugino, the professional purveyor of religious art, whose pictures had been dictated by a purely commercial instinct and bore no relation to his inner beliefs.
7 March, 1882.
My dear Violet,
I have put off writing to you till I had read your book (Belcaro), and lately I have had very little time. I am quite delighted with it and I think it is a book that will do a great deal of good, and I hope it is very much read, for your view of art is the only true one. Of course your book is addressed to a public entirely different from me, for instance. To me the conclusions you come to, or the feeling you start from, are altogether natural and self evident, and need no debating; and the chief interest of the book to me is to know that you possess the right idea. The arguments you used and the process of convincing I watch as an outsider, not having any doubts myself. I think your theory of the all-importance of beauty and its independence of or its hostility to sentiment applies admirably to the antique, and to the short great period of art in Italy. It is certain that at certain times talent entirely overcomes thought or poetry. In decadence, this occurred to an outrageous extent. It is another question and I suppose a matter of personal feeling whether that state of things is more interesting than another; Whether Raphael in his cartoons at Hampton Court is more admirable than in the Sposalizio, or whether he is more admirable at all than Botticelli. There are some like Diirer and Rembrandt and the French Millet who are very "inquietants" for one who thinks as you do, for their talent is enormous too and they have "intimite." Perhaps we will have a chance to skirmish together, for I think very likely I will go to Florence this summer. With love to all your circle,
Your old friend,
John S. Sargent.
His two pictures in the Salon of 1882 were singled out by the critics for unqualified praise. "Before the portrait" {Mrs. Austin), Jules Comte wrote, "one does not know which to admire most, the simplicity of the means which the artist has employed or the brilliance of the result which he has achieved." Henry Houssaye declared that El Jaleo was the most striking picture of the year. Thus at the age of twenty-six Sargent, an American, was being hailed in Paris as the author of the two outstanding pictures of the Salon. If it be true that art knows no nationality (did not Whistler say that you might as well talk of English mathematics as of English art ?), the same might have been said, at any rate in 1882, of criticism, for here was a foreign artist, little more than of age, measuring himself beside the established favourites of Paris, beside Duran and Bonnat, Bougereau and Dagnan Bouveret, Bastien Lepage, Besnard, Boldini and the Impressionists, and being acclaimed as the most successful painter of the year. He was soon receiving as many commissions as he could execute, charging for a full length eight thousand francs, for a half length five thousand, and for his subject pictures and landscapes anything from two to four thousand.
SPANISH WOMAN.
In the late summer of 1882 he was again in Italy, staying in Venice with the Curtises, the parents of his friend Ralph Curtis, at the Palazzo Barbaro, where in 1896 he painted the Venetian Interior, his diploma picture at the Royal Academy. In the autumn he was in Rome and Florence and visited Siena. Here, as Ralph Curtis wrote, the early art of Italy started in Sargent a strong sympathy for the Pre-Raphaelite painters; so much so that in 1884 Curtis had some misgiving lest Sargent, when he migrated to London, might allow his genius to be drawn towards this already over-tilled, if not exhausted field of painting.
In 1883 Sargent exhibited at the Salon his picture of the Boit children under the title of Portraits d'Enfants, and was criticized for "its four corners and a void" and the abbreviated execution, but the most captious acknowledged the beauty of the figures of the children, shown under a strong light upon a background of deep shadow relieved by a faint indication of light through a small window. What strikes the observer, in spite of the rather scattered composition, is the unity of the general impression, and this arrests his attention before his eye begins to take in the detail. The field of vision is occupied by delicately adjusted masses of light and dark, and then as the eye changes its focus, the skill with which the painter has modulated his degrees of definition from the child seated in the foreground to the children further removed and the just- suggested objects in the background becomes strikingly apparent. Henry James in "Picture and Text" declared it to be an achievement "as astonishing on the part of a young man of twenty-six as the portrait of 1881 was astonishing on the part of a young man of twenty- four."
At the end of 1883 Sargent changed his address from 73, Rue Notre Dame des Champs to 41, Boulevard Berthier, and at the beginning of 1884 he went to pay his usual visit to his parents, who for the last few years had been spending their winters at Nice. In March, 1884, he was present in London at a dinner given by Edwin Abbey and Alfred Parsons to the American actor Lawrence Barrett.
A Game of Chess
Chapter IX
IN 1883 Sargent had begun a portrait which was to have a good deal of influence on his career. As far back as 1881 he had met Madame Gautreau in Paris society, where she moved rather conspicuously, shining as a star of considerable beauty, and drawing attention as one dressed in advance of her epoch. It was the period in which in London the professional beauty, with all the specialization which the term connoted, was recognized as having a definite role in the social hierarchy. Madame Gautreau occupied a corresponding position in Paris. Immediately after meeting her, Sargent wrote to his friend del Castillo to find out if he could do anything to induce Madame Gautreau to sit to him. " I have," he wrote, "a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. If you are ' bien avec elle ' and will see her in Paris you might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent." The necessary preliminaries were arranged, and the disillusionment seems to have begun quickly, for after the first few sittings he wrote to Vernon Lee from Nice on February 10 (1883): "In a few days I shall be back in Paris, tackling my other 'envoi/ the Portrait of a Great Beauty. Do you object to people who are 'fardees' to the extent of being a uniform lavender or blot- ting-paper colour all over ? If so you would not care for my sitter; but she has the most beautiful lines, and if the lavender or chlorate of potash-lozenge colour be pretty in itself I should be more than pleased. ,, In another letter, and again to Vernon Lee, he wrote: "Your letter has just reached me still in this country house (Les Chenes Parame) struggling with the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau."
Even when the picture was nearing completion he was assailed by misgivings. "My portrait!" he wrote to Castillo, "it is much changed and far more advanced than when you last saw- it. One day I was dissatisfied with it and dashed a tone of light rose over the former gloomy background. I turned the picture upside down, retired to the other end of the studio and looked at it under my arm. Vast improvement. The elancee figure of the model shows to much greater advantage. The picture is framed and on a great easel, and Carolus has been to see it and said: 'Vous pouvez l'envoyer au Salon avec confiance.' En- couraging, but false. I have made up my mind to be refused."
The picture was accepted for the Salon of 1884. Varnishing day did nothing to reassure the painter. On the opening day he was in a state of extreme nervousness. It was the seventh successive year in which he had exhibited. Every Salon had seen the critics more favourable, the public more ready to applaud. But without suggesting that the critics and public of Paris are fickle, it is probably fair to say that popularity, fame and reputation are more subject to violent fluctuations there than in other European capitals. This, at any rate, was to be Sargent's experience. The doors of the Salon were hardly open before the picture was damned. The public took upon themselves to inveigh against the flagrant insufficiency, judged by prevailing standards, of the sitter's clothing; the critics fell foul of the execution. The Parisian public is always vocal and expressive. The Salon was in an uproar. Here was an occasion such as they had not had since Le Dejeuner sur Herbe, LOlympia and the Exhibition of the Independents. The onslaught was led by the lady's relatives. A demand was made that the picture should be withdrawn. It is not among the least of the curiosities of human nature, that while an individual will confess and even call attention to his own failings, he will deeply resent the same office being undertaken by someone else. So it was with the dress of Madame Gautreau. Here a distinguished artist was proclaiming to the public in paint a fact about herself which she had hitherto never made any attempt to conceal, one which had, indeed, formed one of her many social assets. Her resentment was profound. If the picture could not be withdrawn, the family might at least bide its time, wait till the Salon was closed, the picture delivered, and then by destroying, blot it as an unclean thing from the records of the family. Anticipating this, Sargent, before the exhibition was over, took it away himself. After remaining many years in his studio it now figures as one of the glories of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The scene at the Salon is described in a letter written by Sargent's friend and fellow-painter, Ralph Curtis, to his parents. It will be noticed that at a certain point Sargent's forbearance gave way and that his pugnacity, which has already been referred to, burst out:
My dear People,
Your paper will be ordered this a.m. Yesterday the birthday or funeral of the painter Scamps (John Sargent). Most exquis. weather Walked up Champs E. chestnuts in full flower and dense mob of " tout Paris " in pretty clothes, gesticulating and laughing, slowly going into the Ark of Art. In 15 mins. I saw no end of acquaintances and strangers, and heard every one say " ou est le portrait Gautreau ? " "Oh allez voir" — John covered with dust stopped with his trunks at the club the night before and took me on to his house where we dined. He was very nervous about what he feared, but his fears were far exceeded by the facts of yesterday. There was a grande tapage before it all day. In a few minutes I found him dodging behind doors to avoid friends who looked grave. By the corridors he took me to see it. I was disappointed in the colour. She looks decomposed. All the women jeer. Ah voila "la belle !" "Oh quel horreur! ,, etc. Then a painter exclaims "superbe de style," "magnifique d'audace !" "quel dessin !" Then the blageur club man — "C'est une copie !" "Comment une cope ? " " Mais oui — la peinture d'apres un autre morceau de peinture s'appelle une copie." I heard that. All the a.m. it was one series of bons mots, mauvaises plaisanteries and fierce discussions. John, poor boy, was navre. We got out a big dejeuner at Ledoyens of a dozen painters and ladies and I took him there. In the p.m. the tide turned as I kept saying it would. It was discovered to be the knowing thing to say "etrangement epatant!" I went home with him, and remained there while he went to see the Boits. Mde. Gautreau and mere came to his studio "bathed in tears." I stayed them off but the mother returned and caught him and made a fearful scene saying "Ma fille est perdue — tout Paris se moque d'elle. Mon genre sera force de se battre. Elle mourira de chagrin" etc. John replied it was against all laws to retire a picture. He had painted her exactly as she was dressed, that nothing could be said of the canvas worse than had been said in print of her appearance dans le monde etc. etc. Defending his cause made him feel much better. Still we talked it all over till I o'clock here last night and I fear he has never had such a blow. He says he wants to get out of Paris for a time. He goes to Eng. in 3 weeks. I fear la bas he will fall into Pre-R. influence wh. has got a strange hold of him he says since Siena.
I want him to go to Seville and do the tobacco girls with me in Nov. Says he will — nous verrons.
It would be wearisome to quote at any length the criticisms which appeared. Extracts from La Revue des Deux Mondes and U Illustration will suffice to show at once the fallibility of even the most enlightened, and also the antagonism which the picture roused. In La Revue des Deux Mondes Henry Houssaye wrote:
Nous allions, oublier, le grand succes au Salon; car il y a succes et succes; le portrait deMme. . . . par M. Sargent. Le profil est pointu, l'oeil microscopique, la bouche imperceptible, le teint biafard, le cou corde, le bras droit desorticule, la main desossee; le corsage decollete ne tient pas au buste et semble fuire le contact de la chair.* Le talent au peintre se retrouve seulement dans les reflets miroitants de la jupe de satin noir. Faire d'une jeune femme justement renommee pour sa beaute, une sorte de portrait-charge, viola a quoi menent le parti pris d'une execution lachee et les eloges donnes sans mesure.
In U Illustration Jules Comte, one of the most authoritative critics of the day, expressed himself as follows:
Quelle amere disillusion nous attendait devant l'oeuvre du peintre. . . . Sans doute, nous retrouvons de la grace dans les attaches, surtout dans celle du cou, qui est delicieuse, et la pose ne manque pas de souplesse, mais comment a-t-il pu songer a peindre ainsi Mme. X . . . seche, reche, anguleuse ? On dirait, en face de ce profil sans ligne, un papier decoupe, et encore quelle decoupure. . . . Pas l'ombre de dessin dans la bouche; le nez n'est ni modele, ni fait seulement; pas de plans dans ce visage plaque, et quel teint, et quelle couleur . . .
Jamais nous n'avions vu pareille decheance d'un artiste qui avait semble donner plus que des esperances. Mais voila, on n'a pas le temps de reflechir, on veut aller vite, et on arrive a n'etre plus capable de subir des influences. II y a deux ans, on parlait de Goya a propos
* Albert Woolf wrote in the Figaro in reference to the dress: "One more struggle and the lady will be free." de M. Sargent, qui revenait d'Espagne: nous ne savons 011 il est alle depuis lors; tnais on dirait qu'il n'a plus regarde que dc I'imagerie
Madame Gautreau
De Fourcaud, writing in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, said that anyone standing before the picture could in a very little time fill ten pages with the adjectives, violent and contradictory, which were pronounced by the spectators. Detestable ! Ennuyeux ! Curieux ! Monstrueux ! he gives as examples. He goes on to say that the critics fell into three divisions: those who exclaimed in pious horror at the decolletage, those who recognized the picture as evidence of modernity and applauded the artist's courage, and, lastly, those who condemned the picture for the monochrome colour of the flesh tints. De Fourcaud himself recognizes the picture as a masterpiece, not only for the extreme serenity and rhythm of the lines, but for the summary it presents of the psychology of a professional beauty, who, if regarded and treated only as such by the world, ends by being less a woman than as it were a canon of worldly beauty, dressed, posed and with her whole outlook adjusted to the supreme purpose of the role to which society has condemned her. That indeed, is what the artist has achieved in this masterly portrait.
Here, perhaps, in sheer beauty of line he has approached as near to Ingres as at any time in his career. If we could eliminate the content of the picture and reduce it to the outline in which the figure, the dress and the poise of the head are contained, we should have before us a drawing of free and flowing lines, rhythmic as the stem of a flower.
Sargent, who was now twenty-eight, had been working for ten years in Paris. The Salon of 1884 was t0 nave Deen a culmination of his efforts. He had painted what is now recognized as a masterpiece, displaying excellences which he was perhaps never to surpass. It had been received with a storm of abuse. Paris, which had been smooth and well-disposed and encouraging, had turned, and like a child splintering a plaything, had dealt a violent blow at its recognized favourite. He was not in the least in doubt about his art, but he was always sensitive to atmosphere, always easily affected by an unsympathetic environment. Paris had awakened suddenly one May morning in an uncongenial mood, its friendliness hidden in clouds; the accord which had prevailed between painter and public was at an end. Was it worth while to try and readjust the relation and reconcile the differences ? Was the disappointment accentuated by the unwitting offence given to a reigning beauty ? We do not know. A certain mystery hangs over the whole affair. Sargent was undoubtedly mortified and sore; that, at least, is clear. Perhaps a combination of reasons was urging him to take advantage of the opening which offered itself in London. However that may be, it was to London that he made up his mind to migrate.
Seven years later, in 1891, the same lady was painted by Gustave Courtois. He, too, chose to represent her with her face in direct profile, but turned so that her eyes look to the left side of the canvas. He, too, portrayed her with very much the same openness of attire that had aroused such a storm in 1884. But seven years had brought a change in the way such things were regarded. The picture, which now hangs in the Luxembourg, was accepted by the public without comment, its propriety was unquestioned. The pious protests of 1884 were silent before the revolutionized fashions of 1891. Only one further communication seems to have passed between Sargent and his offended model. In 1906, as the following letter to Major Roller shows, Madame Gautreau had very much modified her opinion of the picture:
On the Thames at Calcot
Palazzo Barbaro
Venice,
Oct. 3rd, 1906. My dear Roller, I think I know what Mme. Gautreau wants to see me about. She wrote me last year of a matter of vital importance — it was that the Kaiser who was such a dear, thought her portrait the most fascinating woman's likeness that he has ever seen, and that he wishes me to have
an exhibition in Berlin of my things. I wrote that I was abroad and couldn't manage it. But to tell you the truth, I don't want to do it. It is a tremendous trouble for me to induce a lot of unwilling people to lend me their "pautrets" and Berlin does not attract me at all.
OX THE THAMES AT CALCOT.
So if you arc taken into Mme. Gautreau *s confidence, and I wish you
would tear your shirt for it, please discourage her from giving me the
K.K. command. v
Yrs. sincerely,
John S. Sargent.
In 191 6 the picture was exhibited at the San Francisco Exhibition, and in January of that year Sargent wrote to his friend Edward Robinson, the well-known director of the Metropolitan Museum:
31, Tite Street,
Chelsea,
My Dear Ned,
. . . The permission to communicate with the Museum when I have something that I think worthy of it, makes me venture to suggest to you, rather than to the Trustees, a proposition for what you may think of it. My portrait of Madame Gautreau is now, with some other things I sent from here at the San Francisco Exhibition and now that it is in America I rather feel inclined to let it stay there if a Museum should want it. I suppose it is the best thing I have done. I would let the Metropolitan Museum have it for £1,000. . . . Let me know your opinion. . . . If Madame Gautreau should not stay in America I think she had better come back here with the rest of my things.
Yrs. ever,
John S. Sargent.
Fortunately, owing to the generosity of Sir Joseph Duveen, the Tate Gallery possesses a study of the same subject, but whether this was done before or after the picture in the Metropolitan Museum I have been unable to discover. Several drawings of Madame Gautreau's profile were found among Sargent's sketches. She is also the subject of another oil-painting now at Fenway Court, and bequeathed, with her other possessions, to the United States by Mrs. Gardner.
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