IIIJAMES A. McNEILL WHISTLER

John La Farge.ALTAR PIECE—Church of the Ascension, New York.By John La Farge.

John La Farge.

ALTAR PIECE—Church of the Ascension, New York.

By John La Farge.

the various phases of culture, of which art began by being one and grew to be the most absorbing.

It was significant that this dreamer should be attracted especially by the nature students among the living painters. That was indicative of the depth and sincerity of his contemplations. But it is still more significant that from the start he should have commenced a critical study of the problems of colour; this proved the independence of his sincerity. Another point of great significance, as affecting his subsequent career, is that, although he afterward made a close study of anatomy, in his apprentice days he seems to have drawn from drawings rather than from the living model, studying, in fact, the abstract made by others instead of the concrete directly studied by himself. Thus the habit of his mind was directed toward the generalization and significance of the figure rather than to its anatomical facts. This made him very early an enthusiastic admirer of Japanese art, and has proved at once the strength and weakness of his subsequent treatment of the figure.

It is frequently asserted that his drawing is not always correct, and from the point of view of the schools he would probably himself plead guilty to the charge. But those who insist upon the point do not perhaps quite comprehend his motive,which is less the actual structure of the form than the inherent significance of the figure. Let us grant at once that the two motives are not antagonistic, that Millet’s “Sower,” for example, is as structurally correct as it is full of significance. But that is to put La Farge to the test of one of the greatest masters of drawing, by comparison with whom very few can stand. By far the greatest number of draughtsmen, while approaching him in correctness, will be far behind him in expression. On the other hand, in the case of La Farge, the significance of a pose or gesture, the vital expression of a figure, is generally admirable. I have in mind, for example, his drawing of Bishop Hatto, pursued by rats. The distance from the thigh to the toes would appear to be exaggerated; but how wonderfully the long drawn out, tense arc of the figure stimulates the imagination to a realization of the agony of the crisis. There is another point. The figure, as it is, so exactly contributes to the decorative balance of the picture. It may be that the instinct of the decorator determined the length of limb, and perhaps also, not at all improbably, the influence of the Japanese. It would not be difficult, for instance, to find in Outamaro’s lovely prints of women just such an elongation to accentuate thesveltegrace with which he wishes to invest them.

I make this suggestion with more confidence, because one can trace in the composition of this picture more than a little of the Japanese arrangement of full and empty spaces; that irregular form of composition which secures a balance by oppositions rather than by repetition of similarities. It is, indeed, the method of the nature student, as true of Velasquez and Rembrandt as of the Japanese. Not that La Farge with his choice appreciation of the old masters could be insensible to the influence of the Italians. His great altarpiece of the Ascension in the Church of the Ascension in New York is reminiscent in its structure of Raphael’s “Disputá.” The space is very similar in shape, and filled with a broad band of figures across the base, a central figure in the upper space, and flanking arcs of angels. Again the mural paintings of “Music” and the “Drama” in the music room of Mr. Whitelaw Reid’s New York house were evidently suggested by the pastoral scenes of the Venetian painters. The latter, however, were themselves, no doubt, suggested by the desire to emancipate painting from the rigidity of preconceived formulas of composition, and it is just this attempt to discover a compromise between the natural and the conventional which is so marked a characteristic of La Farge’s treatment of mural painting.

It may have been an early feeling after this that at least helped to draw him toward Rembrandt, especially toward his religious subjects. I find more than a little of the latter’s influence in the mural paintings in the churches of St. Thomas and of the Incarnation in New York, particularly in the solemn, serious naturalism of the grouping; in the humble devotion with which the spirit of the occasion has been comprehended, and in the significance of gesture and expression, but especially of gesture, through which this spirit has been embodied. A boy’s freshness of faith, dignified by a man’s realization of its import—a quality very rare at any period, and quite likely to be overlooked in this one. It is the outcome of a religious temperament—a thing very different from the religious habit—born of a capacity to feel deeply the significance of things, and by instinct and culture fitted to see the beauty inherent in the significance, whether it be the significance of the spiritual or of the material life or of the subtle analogy between the two. When the painter can comprehend this and set it down on the threshold of every-day experience, in such a way as to make it intimate without being commonplace, its human meaning neither lessening, nor lost in, the splendour of its expression, we may reasonably call him great.

And no one denies to La Farge a splendour of expression. He is thatrara avisamong artists, who not only sees the world as a pageant of coloured light, but has found means to express his visions. His inherited instinct for colour has been assiduously cultivated by observation and scientific study, the researches of Professor Root of Columbia University having been enthusiastically followed and adapted by him to his practical requirements. When circumstances brought to him the opportunity of executing windows, immediately came into play his extensive memories, his dreams of possibilities, and, equally, his independence of conventionalized methods. Finding that he could not reach adequate results in the material available, and realizing the weakness of existing methods, he experimented until he discovered the adaptabilities of opaline glass, which has a suggestion of complementary colours, “a mysterious quality of showing a golden yellow, associated with violet, a pink flush on a ground of green.” Moreover, by the infinite variety of modulations, which its making admits, it allows a degree of light and shade in each piece of glass, which not only gives modelling, but increases the depth of tone, sufficient at places to make the darker parts melt softly into the harsh lead-line. This inventionby John La Farge of the applicability of opaline glass to the making of coloured windows has put a wide range of means in the hands of the artist, not only in the general richness and equally possible delicacy of effect, but in the increased subtlety attainable through complementary effects and effects of opposition; the material including all kinds of variety in the texture, quality, thickness, and even pattern of the glass, and also almost every variation of density and transparence. It is a palette of extraordinary range, perilously serviceable in the hands of an ambitious person of meagre knowledge and feeling, quite susceptive of commonplace exploitation in those of the ordinary designer. But in the hands of a true artist, who thinks in colour, and has a store of gathered observations backed with scientific assurance, it permits the fullest scope to his imagination, and the opportunity of realizing the most diverse and complex schemes of colour, allowing him to reproduce much of the mystery that time has wrought into the mediæval stained glass, and to add to the latter’s chantlike simplicity of colour and structure the complicated harmonies of modern music. It is an art, indeed, that brings the decorator within measurable distance of the musical composer.

The new intent of this glass and the subsequentdevelopments which have made of it a new fabric were so much the outcome of La Farge’s personal need of expression that it is not surprising he has reached results superior to those of others who employ the same medium. A reason which also contributes to his superiority is that his conception from the start formulates itself in colour, whereas the genesis of most windows would appear to be in the lineal design, clothed in colour afterward. In other words, like every true craftsman, La Farge thinks in his material. The effect of this has been, at least, twofold. In the first place, there has always been a reciprocity of influence between his imagination and his material; while he has been big enough to anticipate the possibilities, he has been big enough also to accept the limitations of the medium. In the second place,—and this really follows from the former,—he has preserved an independence in the character of the design, neither attempting to reproduce that of the old cathedral windows, nor dipping, except occasionally, into that universal cook-book of the average designer, the ornament of the Renaissance. With a larger sense of fitness he found, if anywhere, a prototype for his motives in Eastern art, not only in the mosaics of Byzantium, but in the jewelled inlays, lacquers, textiles, andcloisonnéof Japan. Particularly is this true of the windowsof pure decoration which he has executed for private houses and again of those superb windows in the west end of Trinity Church in Boston. In these a cultivated taste will be disposed to feel that the splendour and mystery of the fabric are most abundantly manifested. It is pure decoration of the most subtle and resplendent kind.

On the other hand, as soon as the figure is introduced, particularly when the figure must subserve a religious sentiment, a compromise has to be effected between the abstract decoration and the concrete form, between the conventional and the naturalistic. And the inevitable antagonism between the two has become more difficult to reconcile in these days, both for the artist and for ourselves who enjoy his work, because we are no longer satisfied with the simple abstractions of the human form, which sufficed for the childlike faith and narrower experience of ancient peoples. In all his figure windows, therefore, it is most interesting to study how he has eschewed the pictorial motive, which unfortunately the immature taste of the public so persistently demands, and to which, either on compulsion or because he knows no better, the average designer inclines. La Farge, on the contrary, while frankly admitting the claims or the necessity of naturalistic treatment, endeavours, as far as possible, to find some modern form ofabstraction for the figure, and to offset it with a freer abstraction or conventionalization in the rest of his composition; so that while the significance of the figure, its form and sentiment, is not swamped, there yet survives the impression that the window is not a picture in glass, but an elevated decoration of transparent and translucent mosaic, inlaid in acloisonnéof ornamental lead-lines.

In a brief appreciation of this artist’s work it is natural to dwell upon him in his capacity of a master decorator, for the whole trend of his activities, at first, perhaps, unconsciously, later with a purpose continually strengthened and expanded, has been in this direction. And he has proved himself a master not only within the restricted field of American art, but in comparison with the master decorators of Europe.

I have spoken of La Farge’s writings being a commentary upon his artistic acts. Often it is in a man’s lighter moments that he makes clear to us the workings of his mind, and La Farge has done so in the journal which he wrote during a vacation in the South Sea Islands. It is the spontaneous utterance of a scholar, at once a dreamer and an analyst; of an artist, also, who sees pictures everywhere; and its word-painting and many-faceted allusiveness to all kinds of memories, derived from art and life and literature, render these impressions of new scenes, which still retain some flavour of the antique world, unique in their exquisite beauty and suggestiveness. Let me quote one passage: “From the intricate tangle of green we saw the amethyst sea and the white line of sounding surf, cutting through the sloping pillars of the cocoanuts that made a mall along the shore; and over on the other side of the narrow harbour the great high green wall of the mountain, warm in the sun, its fringe of cocoanut groves and the few huts hidden within it softened below by the haze blown up from the breakers. All made a picture not too large to be taken in at a glance.” Nor yet too distant. The harbour, observe, is narrow and bounded by a high green wall of mountain. The picture was not shaping itself to him as it might have done to the eyes of a pure landscapist, but in a comparatively flat pattern, as of a wall or window decoration. He sees it with the instinct of a decorator and with his own personal predilections; for he dwells upon the combination of green and blue, which any student of his work may feel to have particular fascination for him. He notes in one part the tangle of green, its suggestive subtlety of pattern and tone; in another, where the huts are half hidden, the welcome spot of density; again,

Copyright by John La Farge.THE ANGEL OF THE SUN.Decoration in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, New York.By John La Farge.

THE ANGEL OF THE SUN.

Decoration in the Church of the Paulist Fathers, New York.

By John La Farge.

the value of mystery in the haze; and finally he correlates the beauties of contrasted forms and spaces and the varying brilliance and softness of the coloured light. As I said, it is a decorator’s vision, and the same in their different degrees of sketchiness is revealed in the water-colour drawings made at the same time. They are so many notes and records of a mind perpetually intent on decorative problems.

Recently he wrote a short but exceedingly suggestive appreciation of Puvis de Chavannes, suggestive most of all because of its conscious and unconscious implication of his own experience and desires with those of a brother master in decoration. In their moral and mental elevation there is much affinity between the two men: Puvis, a Burgundian by birth, by education a Lyonnais, simultaneously, therefore, romantic and logical; La Farge, of French descent with romantic and adventurous associations, yet influenced by the vital practicalness of American environment. Both have sought to reconcile their respect for tradition with their interest in the living present; and to recognize the limitations imposed both by their medium and by their own individual personality, disciplining themselves to accept the inevitable and to carry their personal development to its farthest possibility. Its manifestationsin each case are widely different: the robust Puvis detaching himself more and more from the material and tending to an extreme of spiritual refinement; the frailer physique of La Farge reaching out farther and farther toward the interpretation of spirit by means of material splendour. The differences were personal and local; but in the quality of their minds and their attitude toward art there is an unquestionable affinity between these two preëminent master decorators.

If I read La Farge’s art aright, it is the product of a wide and penetrating vision, simplified by selection; the theme is then comprehended in its vital significance, and all the force of his imagination is assembled to embroider it with a web of elaborate orchestration.

WE are already far enough away from the middle of the last century to gain a fair perspective of it. In matters of belief and feeling, it was a period of little faith and less initiative. Men moved forward with their faces turned backward,—in the religious world, seeking ideals in mediævalism; in art, also, borrowing their motives from the past. It was a time of rediscovery, of revivals; less of new birth or growth than of new assimilations. Velasquez, for example, was found to exist; so, also, Rembrandt; and Caucasian civilization became conscious of an Oriental art from farther round the globe than the Levant or even India. Japan was discovered. Today these three names represent potent influences in art. A few years ago their significance was not appreciated beyond the studios; still a few years farther back, and scarcely even there. It was Whistler’s discernment that early recognized their worth; his genius that utilized the significance so uniquely. How he did it is characteristic of himself, butequally of the modernity of which he is so consummate a representative.

And what of this modernity? Intrinsically it is not a new thing, though taking on some special colour from its particular time of reappearance, being indeed a culture of manners rather than of convictions. It is analytical, for it is part of, or compelled by, the contemporary scientific movement; it is intolerant of restraint, except such as it chooses for itself; is callous when not personally interested, and finds its interest in subtleties; its faith is self-found and felt to be honoured by the discovery; in scope not so much broad and embracing as diffused and discriminating; for depth, it substitutes a carefulness about many things, and for sincerity a nice tactfulness. It is polished, dainty in taste and manners, seeking the essence of life in its most varified appeal to the senses, even sometimes in abnormal depravity. It is, in fact, the very antithesis of brawn and muscle, of hard and wholesome thinking, of thebourgeoisieand Philistinism, through which a comfortable world is provided for modernity to bask in, either as a rarely delicate exotic or a upas tree.

While Whistler as a man, in his attitude toward the world, has been the Beau Brummel of this nineteenth-century modernity, he has kept his art in a beautiful isolation, selecting for itonly the choicest contributions of the spirit of the age and impressing upon them the fine distinction of his unique personality. Thus, while some of his contemporaries in the search for new sensations pushed their analysis into the gutter, his work has been invariably fragrant and pure. He has been a consistent apostle of beauty, of the sane and normal type of it. I do not mean beauty as it is commonly understood, for he has had his very personal ideas and his own modes of reaching them; but that the source in which he has always looked for them has been sane and normal; so that, amid the craving for new sensations and for new forms of expression, by which, like others, he has been affected, and with a taste also for notoriety and for shocking the vulgar, he has never in his art deviated from the sweet and wholesome. Nor has he lived without a strong faith. He has believed in himself without reservation, and just as absolutely in his art as he has formulated it. There is one god, and Whistler is its prophet; a creed narrow and intolerant, but abundantly justified, if you accept his god, which, again, is Whistler—the spiritualegowithin him to which all his life he has tried to give an adequate expression.

For his faith at root is a very simple one: the love of beauty and the expression of it; onlybeauty with him is one of essence and significance, quite removed from any literary allusiveness, and as far as possible expressed by means which are solely the products of brush or etching needle, sensation and method approximating as much as may be to the exclusively abstract ones of music. He cannot escape the concrete altogether and must often use as vehicles of expression things to which the dictionary assigns terms, and to which the association of memory and ideas has given a verbal significance. But even in using these he feels such significance extraneous, and subordinates it as far as possible to the special æsthetic significance of the pictorial art. It is the meaning that these things have for the artist’s peculiar vision that he tries to keep free from other allusion—abstract. It is not the object before him for the time being that is worth his consideration, but the enjoyment of the purely æsthetic impression of it aroused in his own mind, of which he seeks to express the essence in his picture. It is a theory of art all but too subtle for human nature’s daily food; in a world in which we are continually confusing cause and effect, the object with the subject, the source of our enjoyment with the enjoyment itself; a theory quite intolerable when exploited by a mediocre painter, or by a facile painter of mediocre mind;only, perhaps, so acceptable in Whistler’s case, because it is essentially a product of his own unique originality.

It was his craving for abstract expression as well as for abstract sensation that led to his symphonies; and the storm of abuse and ridicule which they aroused gave him, no doubt, a keener relish for such studies. It would be too much to say that any of them were done deliberately to mystify the public; but that he found a sly relish in the mystification is most probable, and one may believe that some of these, to him only experiments in the record of impressions, were exhibited with the Satanic purpose of infuriating a public, so enamoured of the “finished picture.” Today, however, these studies are applauded, and Whistler is probably as contemptuous of the undiscriminating approval as of the indiscriminate abuse. For really their vogue is as open to suspicion as would be a vogue of Bach. In their lack of any graspable theme and in their delicately elaborated orchestration of tone they can be appreciated, priced, that is to say, at their proper worth, only by those whose sense of colour is very cultivated; nor even, perhaps, by all of them, for these impressions are so personal to their author that they must always mean more and otherwise to him than to others.

The vogue, therefore, may well make him sad, and sadness with Whistler takes the form of contempt. It is the distortion of his character or the bias to its flaws produced by opposition. Conviction has stiffened into arrogance, individuality become deflected toward an attitude of pose. These blemishes are absent from his work, which is always serene and lovable; they are merely incidental to the man and should not enter into an appreciation of his art, except that he has himself forced a recognition of them even upon his admirers. It is this aspect of him which Boldini has thrust upon the world in his well-known portrait. I have always resented it, for it is founded only on partial fact, suppressing the better facts and smacking too much of Boldini himself and of the pruriency of suggestion, with which he has invested so many portraits. The Whistler that we see in this picture, sitting sideways on a chair, his elbow on the back of it and his long fingers thrust through the snaky black hair, represents the last word in modernity; thrilling with nervous vibration, keyed to snapping intensity; a creation of brilliant egoism, quivering on the edge of insanity; the quintessence of refined callousness and subtlety. How much truer to the man and the artist is Rajon’s portrait; nimbly impressionable, clever and elegant, the lurking devil in

From the Luxembourg Gallery.PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER.By James A. McNeill Whistler.

From the Luxembourg Gallery.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST’S MOTHER.

By James A. McNeill Whistler.

From the collection of Colonel Frank J. Hecker.THE MUSIC ROOM.By James A. McNeill Whistler.

From the collection of Colonel Frank J. Hecker.

THE MUSIC ROOM.

By James A. McNeill Whistler.

the eye and touch of cynicism on the lip not enough to disguise an underlying sweetness and freshness of mind. The other, in its half-truth, is a travesty; this one, very expressive of the mingled qualities of this remarkable man.

For none but a man of peculiar sweetness of mind could have conceived that masterpiece in the Luxembourg, “The Portrait of My Mother.” Garbed in black, as you will remember, she sits in profile, with her feet upon a footstool and her hands laid peacefully and elegantly on her lap; the lawn and lace of her cap delicately silhouetted against the gray wall. She gazes with tranquil intensity beyond the limit of our comprehension along the vista of memories, leading back through maternity to a beautiful youth. Nor is there any cynicism in “The White Girl,” that symphony in white, rejected at the Salon of 1863, when the artist was twenty-nine years old, but conspicuous in theSalon des Refusés. The girl stands mysteriously aloof from all contact with, or suggestion of, the world, her dark eyes staring with a troubled, wistful look, as if she had been surprised in her maiden meditation and were apprehensive of something she cannot fathom, and is too reliant upon herself to wholly fear. The picture is no brilliant epitome of shallowness, but an almost reverential conception, in exquisitelyidealized degree, of the poetry of maidenhood, maturing normally. In both these pictures, which come as near as anything which Whistler has done to the generally accepted idea of a subject, it is the significance, in the one case of motherhood, in the other of maidenhood, that he has dwelt upon, and in both with the fullest reliance upon the æsthetic suggestion to the sense, respectively, of black and gray, and of white, elaborated to an extreme of subtlety. It would be impossible, I mean, that the colour schemes, for example, could be reversed; each is so intentionally and conclusively the language fitted to the idea, that one might as well try to put the words of Juliet into the mouth of Volumnia.

In pictures like “The Music Room,” there is a further step toward abstraction. So far as it represents the interior of a room with walls of ivory-white set off with dainty rose-sprigged curtains, in which a lady in black riding-habit stands by a marble mantelpiece, while a child in white frock sits a little farther back reading, it is agenrepicture of that sort that Alfred Stevens painted, done not for any particular significance in the figures, but for the opportunity which it yields of a delicate scheme of colour and exquisite adjustment of values, and for the pure enjoyment of representing the æsthetic significance of these qualities.But it is at once more subtle and more daring than Stevens could have wrought. It involves a problem, the very difficulty of which no doubt keyed the artist to enthusiasm, to keep the child in white behind the figure in black, and to make the latter a distinguished ornament in the picture, while still preserving its pliant relation to its light surroundings—a problem not improbably suggested, in part at least, by one of Outamaro’s prints, at any rate in its Caucasian transposition worthy to be compared with the work of the Japanese master. Nor is it only a problem in skill. Jet is beautiful in tone and texture, and so is ivory, and the combination of the two, set off with delicate accents of rose, creates a beauty of its own.

“Variations in Flesh and Green—The Balcony” may be selected as a still further advance toward abstract sensation and expression. These girls in kimonas, standing, sitting, and reclining on the edge of a river with a glimpse of factory chimneys across the water, mean nothing in a “subject” sense, and lack even the reasonableness of the figures in the previous picture. They are parts of a fantasy, pure and simple, to which they contribute impersonally; an artist’s dream of atmosphere and colour, which you will enjoy or not, according as you can enter into the abstract

From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.NOCTURE—BOGNORBy James A. McNeill Whistler.

From the collection of Charles L. Freer, Esq.

NOCTURE—BOGNOR

By James A. McNeill Whistler.

intention of the artist. Reaching the essence of beauty to a degree still less alloyed is such a picture as “Bognor—Nocturne”: blue smooth water with shadowy shapes of trawlers gliding like dusky phantoms, and of figures standing in the shallow surf; blue sky and atmosphere, penetrated with silvery luminousness. It is a scene of exquisite refreshment to the spirit, mysteriously etherealized, the artist being so absorbed with the spiritual presence of the summer night that his own soul echoes its very heart-beats.

Once again, then, in all these pictures, it is the essence or innermost significance of the theme that Whistler treats; itself a quality so immaterial that he shrinks from expressing even matter in too distinct or tangible a form, enveloping it in a shrouded light, representing it as a concord of coloured masses with a preference for delicate monotony of hues and soft accentuations, seeking by all means to spiritualize the material. And this without loss of stateliness; he has learned the dignity of the great line from Velasquez, and from him, too, the magisterial use of blacks and grays. Nor with the wild irrelevance of the visionary; there are piquancy and virility in all his pictures, not of lively colour and rampageous brush work, but attained through subtle surprises of detail and decorative originality—qualities

From the collection of Charles L. Feer, Esq.THE BALCONY.By James A. McNeill Whistler.

From the collection of Charles L. Feer, Esq.

THE BALCONY.

By James A. McNeill Whistler.

gleaned from the Japanese. Again, in the trancelike intensity of Rossetti’s figures, he may have found a quality akin to his own spirituality of sentiment, just as his love of light and of delicate discrimination of values links his art to that of the impressionists. And out of these various influences, his own personality, irresistibly original, at once fanciful and penetrating, serene and nervous, permeated with the quintessence of sensuous refinement, he has fashioned for himself a language “faithful to the colouring of his own spirit,” in the strictest sense original and stamped with style—a style that is simple, earnest, grand.

And even closer precision of personal expression appears in Whistler’s etchings. For to one who seeks to render, not the facts, but his sense of the facts, etching offers greater freedom than painting. It is the art of all others which permits an artist to be recognized by what heomits, the one in which the means employed may be most pregnant of suggestion and in closest accord with the personal idiosyncrasy of the man. To Whistler, therefore, with his intense individuality, his discerning search for the significance of beauty and his instinct for simplicity and economy of means which will yet yield a full complexity of meaning, etching early became a cherished form of expression. In the “Little French Series” (1858), the “Thames Series” (1871), the “First Venice Series” (1880), and the “Second Venice Series” (1887), as well as in other plates etched in France, Holland, and Belgium, he has proved himself the greatest master of the needle since Rembrandt. Indeed, the eminent painter-etcher and connoisseur, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, is credited with the assertion that, if he had to dispose of either his Rembrandts or his Whistlers, it would be the former that he would relinquish.

There is a great difference, even in the point of view, between the Dutch master and his modern rival. Both approached their subject, if one may say so, in a reverential way; but the former with an absorption in the scene and a desire to reproduce it faithfully. Whistler, on the other hand, with more aloofness of feeling, selecting the mood or phase of it on which he chooses to dwell that he may inform it with his own personal sense of significance. The Rembrandt print—to borrow De Quincey’s distinction—is rather a triumph of knowledge; the Whistler a triumph of power. While the method of both represents the highest degree of pregnant succinctness, Rembrandt drew the landscape while Whistler transposes from it. The visible means, in his later etchings, become less and less, their significance continually fuller; and in his study of phases of nature he has carried the interpretation of light and atmosphere beyond the limits of Rembrandt.

In the “Thames Series,” which has perpetuated the since vanished characteristics of the old river side, he came nearest to the Dutch etcher, recording the scenes with a comprehension of detail as complete as that of Rembrandt’s “Mill.” Seeking always the significance of his subject, he seems to have felt that here the significance lay in the curious, dilapidated medley of details; that even a weather-worn timber and the very nails in it contributed their share to the impression, so that, while he must needs select and omit, the problem was one of how much toavoidomitting. On the other hand, in his later prints, the problem is reversed. Following his own personal evolution toward more complete abstraction, both in sense and expression, it is how little he may put in and yet express the full significance.

Whistler’s art, in brief, is logically related, alike to realism, to the poetry of the men of 1830, and to the motives of the impressionists, and represents the wider influence of his times in its keen analysis of phenomena and the independently personal bias he has given to it; in the search for new sensations of the most subtle kind and ina tendency at times to exalt good manners, that is to say style, above the qualities of intrinsic merit. His art has been too much a product of himself, notwithstanding that it reflects in spiritualized form the higher tendencies of his age, for him to have been the founder of a school or to have influenced followers directly. Yet, indirectly, his influence has been weighty. Alike by his example and by his pungent utterances he has been instrumental, more than others, in giving aquietusto mediocrity in art, both to the bathos of the literary picture and to the banality of merely imitative painting. Mediocrity still lingers and must linger as long as commonplace minds devote themselves to painting; but its prestige has been so successfully impaired that now we regard a taste for it on the part of a collector of pictures as an infantile disease, like the measles, incidental to an early career of appreciation, though not necessarily fatal to more matured connoisseurship.

Whether we shall ever reach that degree of cultivation which will need no further stimulus to enjoyment in a picture than such abstract suggestion to the imagination as music affords, time alone will show. Meanwhile, as we are able to conceive of a picture now, it has its genesis in the concrete, from which even Whistler has not tried to emancipate himself entirely. There is a beautiful humanity in most of his work, the humanity of human nature or the human relation of the landscape to ourselves; and if he is able sometimes to enchant us without any apparent human significance, it is because he is Whistler—a genius.

ASUMMARY of John S. Sargent’s position as an artist must recall the exhibition of his work shown at Copley Hall, Boston, in 1899. There were exhibited some fifty portraits and seventy-five sketches and studies, while hard by in the Museum hung his large subject picture, “El Jaleo,” and in the library could be seen his mural decorations. It was an impressive showing, both in amount and quality, for an artist then little over forty years of age.

But Sargent has been a favoured child of the Muses, and early reached a maturity for which others have to labour long and in the face of disappointments. He, however, had never anything to unlearn. From the first he came under the influence of taste and style, the qualities which to this day most distinguish his work. The son of a Massachusetts gentleman who had retired from the practice of medicine in Philadelphia, he was born in Florence, and there spent his youth. The home life was penetrated with refinement;a good classical and modern education came in due course, and all around him were the dignity and beauty of Florence, its tender beauty of atmosphere and colour and the noble memorials of its galleries and streets. Perhaps no city in the world has so distinctive a spirit, at once stimulating to the intellect and refining to the senses. Those of us who have felt it only after years of buffeting in a grosser atmosphere can but guess what it means to have come under its influence from childhood, during the impressionable period of youth up to eighteen. And not as a mere resident of the place, from the force of habit purblind to its charm, but quickened by parents who themselves were products of another kind of civilization, keen to appreciate, to absorb, and to live in its spirit; possessed, also, of the American temperament so alert and sensitive to impressions, while removed from the dulling influence of our exceeding practicalness.

When the young Sargent knocked at the studio of Carolus-Duran in theBoulevard Montparnassewith a portfolio of studies under his arm, drawings from Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, he was no smart young student, full of up-to-date ideas. Very modest he is described as being, of quiet, reflective disposition, pleased that his drawings won the approval of the master and the

CARMENCITA.By John S. Sargent.

CARMENCITA.

By John S. Sargent.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND.By John S. Sargent.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

PORTRAIT OF MR. MARQUAND.

By John S. Sargent.

enthusiasm of the students, and eager to set himself to learn. With a facility that was partly a natural gift, partly the result of a steady acceptance of the problems presented, he proceeded to absorb the master; his breadth of picturesque style and refined pictorial sense, his sound and scientific method, not devoid of certain tricks of illusion and his piquant and persuasive modernity—the sum total of an art that was a modern Frenchman’s paraphrase of one of the biggest of the old masters, Velasquez. At twenty-three he painted a portrait of Carolus, which shows he had absorbed his master so thoroughly as to be unconscious of the incidentals of his method and to have grasped only the essentials with such complete assimilation, that what he produces is already his own. Later, he himself visited Madrid and came under the direct spell of Velasquez. The grand line he had learned while still a boy, and from Carolus the seeing of colour as coloured light, the modelling in planes, the mysteries of sharp and vanishing outlines, appearing and reappearing under the natural action of light, realism of observation at once brilliant and refined, large and penetrating; and all these qualities he found united in the subtly grandiose canvases of the great Spaniard. Finally, from all these influences, he has fashioned a method very much his own.

And how shall one describe this method? It reveals the alertness and versatility of the American temperament. Nothing escapes his observation, up to a certain point at least; he is never tired of fresh experiment; never repeats his compositions and schemes of colour, nor shows perfunctoriness or weariness of brush. In all his work there is a vivid meaningfulness; in his portraits, especially, an amazing suggestion of actuality. On the other hand, his virtuosity is largely French, reaching a perfection of assurance that the quick-witted American is, for the most part, in too great a hurry to acquire; a patient perfection, not reliant upon mere impression or force of temperament. In its abounding resourcefulness there is a mingling of audacity and conscientiousness; a facility so complete that the acts of perception and of execution seem identical, and an honesty that does not shrink from admitting that such and such a point was unattainable by him, or that to have attained it would have disturbed the balance of the whole. And yet this virtuosity, though it is French in character, is free of the French manner, as indeed of any mannerism. For example, his English men and women, his English children especially, belong distinctly to English life. Though he may portray them in terms of Parisian technique, he never confuses the idioms,being far too keenly alive to the subtle differences of race.

This skill of hand is at the service of a brilliant pictorial sense. Like a true painter, he sees a picture in everything he studies. Perhaps it would be truer to say that he seesthepicture, the one which for the time being has taken possession of his imagination and to which he is willing to sacrifice even truth, or at least some portion of truth, rather than to permit the integrity of his mental picture to be impaired. This pictorial sense is one of the sources of the greatness and of the less than greatness in his work. It gives to each of his canvases a distinct æsthetic charm; grandiose, for example, in the portrait of “Lady Elcho, Mrs. Arden, and Mrs. Tennant,” ravishingly elegant in the “Mrs. Meyer and Children,” delicately quaint in the “Beatrix,” and so on through a range of motives, each variously characterized by grandeur of line, suppleness of arrangement, and fascinating surprise of detail; used with extraordinary originality, but always conformable to an instinctive sense of balance and rhythm. And then, too, how tactful is the selection of pose, costume, and accessories! With what taste he creates environment for his conception of the subject!

It is, however, in regard to the conception of his subject that Sargent challenges criticism. Howfar does he render the character of the sitter? To say that his characterization is slap-dash and superficial is, surely, going too far. It was confuted by that exhibition of fifty portraits, which represented at least fifty distinct persons. Nor with that panorama of his art in one’s memory can one admit that he has no real sympathy with his sitters. Very possibly, however, it is not apersonalsympathy, and for two reasons. He is a picture maker before he is a portraitist, and in portraiture has less interest in the individual than in the type which he or she represents. This latter particular is symptomatic, partly of the artist himself and partly of his times. He is not of the world in which he plays so conspicuous a part, but preserves an aloofness from it and studies it with the collectedness of an onlooker interested in the moving show and in its general trends of motive, but with an individual sympathy only occasionally elicited, as when he paints Georg Henschel, like himself, a musician. Again it is an affectation of the class from which most of his sitters, especially the ladies, are drawn to exhibit the studied unconviction so deliciously represented in Anthony Hope’s “Dolly Dialogues.” The elegant shallowness of so many of his portraits is true enough in a general way, and very likely in the individual case. There is another type, embodying the thinking-for-herselfand the greater latitude of action of the modern woman. They are, to a certain extent, the product of an age of nerves, and in his portraits of them there is perceptible an equivalent restlessness of manner, a highly strung intention, almost a stringiness of nervous expression. Again, I can recall in the Boston exhibition two portraits of ladies whoseespritwas of a kind that quiet folks would consider fast. Their cases also had been keenly diagnosed and met with the skill of an artist who did not care to extenuate, nor on the other hand had fallen under personal subjection to the physical attractiveness, but set down what he saw and surrounded it with the elegant atmosphere that was its salvation in real life. It is here that he compares to such advantage with a painter like Boldini. Sargent has instinctive refinement. It would be quite impossible for him to have any feelings toward his subjects other than those of a true gentleman; and, though he may represent in a lady a full flavour of the modern spirit, he never allows the modernity to exceed the limits of good taste. For the same reason Sargent’s pictures, though many of them have a restlessness of their own, seem quiet alongside Boldini’s. The latter makes a motive of nervous tenuosity, and his pictures, if seen frequently, become wiry in suggestion, and defeat their own purpose of beingvibrative; but Sargent’s, controlled by a fine sobriety of feeling, another phase of his unfailing taste and tact, retain their suppleness. Their actuality is all the more convincing because it is not the motive, but an incident.

Yet, even so, this actuality is of a very different quality from that reached by the old masters. I have in mind an inevitable comparison, suggested by his portrait of Mr. Marquand in the Metropolitan Museum with one by Titian on the same wall and with a Franz Hals, a Velasquez, and a Rembrandt in an adjoining gallery. In all these latter there is a gravity of feeling that is not alone due to the subduing effects of time; while Sargent’s portrait, even apart from the sleek fatness of the brush work which age will mature, is the product of a habit of mind altogether different. It lacks the intimacy of the “Wife” of Franz Hals, the penetrating depth of the “Doge Grimani,” the quiet assurance of Velasquez’s “Don Carlos,” and the intense sympathy of the Rembrandt, though the last two are only moderate examples of the masters. Instead, it reveals a certain assertiveness in its assurance, an intensity of nervous force rather than of intellectual or sympathetic effort, a brilliant epitome rather than a profound study. It has not the permanence of feeling, either in its characterization or method;that suggestion of perennial, stable truth, which, so far as we can judge from the past, would insure it a place among the great old masters of the future. Among the masters we may feel certain that Sargent will be reckoned as having been one of the most conspicuous figures of his age; but his vogue will rise and dwindle according to the amount of interest felt for the time being in the age which he represented; it will scarcely have that inevitableness of conviction, which, when once recognized, must abide. If this forecast is correct, the reason is that Sargent, though raised above his time, scarcely reveals in his portraits elevation of mind; he has the clear eye of the philosopher without his depth and breadth of vision; he has possessed himself of his age, and the age has taken possession of him. He swims on its sea with strokes of magnificent assurance, but with a vision bounded by the little surface waves around him; he has not sat above upon the cliffs, quietly pondering its wider and grander movements.

So the intimacy revealed in the great majority of Sargent’s portraits is of that degree and quality which passes for intimacy in the polite society of to-day—a conformability to certain types of manner and feeling, with interesting little accents of individuality, that shall distinguish without too keenly differentiating; traits of style rather thanof personality. Sometimes there is even less than this. The subject would seem to have got upon the artist’s nerves, interfering with the usual poise of his study, so that he seems to have allowed himself to be sidetracked on to some loopline of the temperament. Occasionally he touches a deeper level of intimacy, as in the portraits of Henschel, Mr. Penrose, and Mr. Marquand, and oftentimes in children’s portraits, notably in that of Homer St. Gaudens. But for the most part, I believe, it is not the personality of the sitter that attracts us so much as that of the artist, which he has seized upon the occasion to present to us; a personality of inexhaustible facets and of a variety of expression that, for the time being at least, creates an illusion of being all-sufficient.

What a contrast he presents to Whistler, with whom he shares the honour of being among the very few distinctly notable painters of the present day! Sargent with his grip upon the actual, Whistler in his search for the supersensitive significance, are the direct antipodes in motive. Each started with a justifiable consciousness of superiority to the average taste of his times; but while Whistler, on one side of his character a man of the world, has in his art withdrawn himself into a secluded region of poetry, Sargent, almost a recluse,has delighted his imagination with the seemings and shows of things and with their material significance.

Is the reason for this merely that success claimed him early and that he has not been able to extricate himself from the golden entanglement, or that deeper one, noticeable in many artists, that their artistic personality is the direct antithesis of that personality by which they are commonly known to the world? Otherwise, this man with his gift of seeing pictures, with his power of a brush that seems loaded with light rather than with pigment, with his smiting force or tender suggestiveness of expression—what might he not have done had he followed the bent of his mind, a mind stored with culture, serene and reflective? Something, doubtless, less dazzling than his portraits, but more poetical, more mysteriously suggestive, more distinctly creative. As it is, some little studies of Venice, such as “Venetian Bead Stringers,” come nearer probably to the true spirit of Sargent; to that exquisiteness of fancy which he developed more completely in the study of children lighting lanterns in a garden, “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.” The refined originality of this embroidery of light and shadow, the lights so brilliant, the shadows penetrated with mystery, the affectionate tenderness with which the children and flowersare represented, the lovely imaginativeness of the whole conception, bespoke qualities which have appeared only partially in the portraits, and are altogether of a rarer significance than their vivid actuality. This picture is perhaps even more acceptable than his elaborate decorations in the Boston Public Library, because it represents more unreservedly an artist’s vision and one of such delicate apprehensiveness. The decorations involve a more laboured, conscious effort to produce something noble, and the literary allusion encroaches somewhat upon the æsthetic. Yet to enjoy them we are not bound to thread our way through the maze of mythological suggestion. The panels are full of dignity and beauty, considered purely as decoration; finely rhythmical in the frieze, stern with tensity of form and deliberate harshness of colour in the lunette, a labyrinth of tapestried ornament in the soffit of the arch.

Their significance, both as decoration and allusion, is progressive, passing from the serene simplicity and tempered realism of the prophets, through the mingling of human tragedy and symbolism in the misery of the apostate Jews, up to the bewilderment of beauty and horror in the representation of the tangle of false faiths. Moreover, this graduation of motive bears a very skilfully adjusted relation to the architectural functionof the several spaces embellished. Unfortunately the room itself has very little architectural reasonableness, and is unworthy of the decorations, which will not establish their full dignity of effect until the remaining spaces are filled. So it is scarcely fair to compare them with Puvis de Chavannes’s in the same building, which involve a completed scheme, for which, too, the architects made due provision. Further, the motives of the two artists are so radically different: Puvis, content to shadow forth a vague conception in abstract terms; Sargent, seeking to embody the facts of men’s mental and moral life in their direct and actual significance. It was a more daring problem, and one that perhaps is more closely knitted to the feeling of our times. The solution is a most notable attempt to bring the intellectual faculties into harmonious accord with the æsthetic.

It is along the line of these decorations and of “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose” that one believes the true Sargent may be discerned. In them he is giving utterance to himself; in his portraits responding with a certainhauteurto the allurements of his day.

IN the American section at the recent Paris Exposition, no painter made a more distinct mark than Winslow Homer. The foreign critics seemed to be conscious of a fresh note in his pictures: one not traceable to European influences, still less suggestive of Parisian technique; a note of unmistakable force and independence. Could it be considered representatively American?

Almost for the first time this question appeared to be asked with a real interest in the answer. Foreigners had long been acquainted with painters from America, who came over in increasing numbers, and showed a remarkable faculty of quickly assimilating the teaching and influences of Europe. But were there any distinctively American painters? Those students who remained in Europe, though many of them were individual and forceful men, merged themselves more or less completely in their new environment. What, then, became of those who returned to America? Presumably they carried back with them the Europeanismsthey had acquired. So far as could be judged from the showing made by American painters at previous expositions, they were but reflecting the influences of Paris or of German and English painting. Was there, in fact, as distinguished from art in America, any American art? And with a languid interest in a matter so far detached from their personal knowledge, the foreigners had answered the question for themselves, negatively. However, the Exposition of 1900 contained an American section which revealed a great deal of motive and character that could not be lightly dismissed as but a reflex of Europe. It might have been made even more representative of the difference which the American environment is steadily impressing upon the work of Americans who live and paint at home; but notwithstanding its shortcomings in this respect, the exhibition undoubtedly gave evidence that such difference already existed. The evidence was largely of the circumstantial kind, to be gathered not from any patent fact so much as from a collating of various hints of motive and character, and from a comparison of them with those exhibited in the pictures of other countries.

Then one gradually became conscious of more sobriety, earnestness, and simplicity; in fact, of a more obvious conviction, in the American work

Back to Index Next