John Singer Sargent

I attended this past summer an exhibit at the Met Museum of John Singer Sargent's portrait work and gained there a new appreciation of the artist and his abilities.  Without ever having taken the time to study his work, I had previously regarded him primarily as a society painter, technically proficient perhaps, but superficial and mannered in his approach to art.  He had always seemed something of an anachronism, a holdover from the nineteenth century who was still working in the academic tradition at the same time Picasso and Matisse were revolutionizing modern art.  The exhibit helped me better understand the artist's formidable technique and his uncanny knack for capturing the personality of his sitters as well as his ability to absorb the lessons taught him by Manet and other Impressionists.

John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff turned out to be an excellent companion to the exhibit.  Though I would have preferred a more in-depth biography of this complex artist who moved easily in high society and yet was never fully comfortable within it, the book does provide at least an outline of the artist's life and personality.  Still, there are significant gaps.  For example, while the book covers fairly well the training Sargent received in Paris from Carolus-Duran, it fails to pay sufficient attention to the impressions he had received in childhood while viewing the work of the old masters in Italy and the influence that these had on his later work.

The book, however, does cover all the major episodes of Sargent's life.  An entire chapter is devoted, as it should be, to the scandal surrounding the 1884 Portrait of Madame X that had been the centerpiece of the Parisian section of the Met exhibit.  The notoriety the portrait garnered - incomprehensible now to the twenty-first century viewer - effectively ended Sargent's career in France and forced him into virtual exile in England.  There are also chapters devoted to the time Sargent spent on the Boston murals and to the paintings he completed during World War I.  Although most of the latter were little more than attempts at patriotic propaganda, the painting Gassed surpassed these and became a powerful indictment of the horrors of modern warfare.  The time spent at the front lines showed an entirely new side to Sargent's personality.

Ratcliff also goes to a great deal of trouble to emphasize the painter's relationship to the novelist Henry James.  Though it's true both were expatriate Americans living in England, the differences between them were far more profound than the similarities no matter how good friends they may have been.  One can never imagine James at home anywhere but in the gas lit parlors of British upper crust society, but Sargent was much more a maverick and often impatient with the social obligations foisted upon him by virtue of his success.  At the root of his desire to give up portrait painting was the longing to escape the very milieu in which James reveled.

One of aspect of Sargent's work that is not addressed at all in this study is the influence exerted upon him by Orientalism.  Though Ratcliff dutifully notes in passing the time the artist spent in the Mideast (Sargent produced a number of major paintings during his visit to North Africa in 1879 and again in Egypt in 1890), the author astonishingly offers no detailed commentary on any of these.  One of Sargent's most important works in this vein, Fumée d'Ambre Gris, is reproduced only in small format and in black & white.  In the same manner, Ratcliff has nothing to say about The Nude Egyptian Girl other than to offer a banal quote from a review in the Magazine of Art regarding the work's execution, this even though the image is the only oil Sargent ever painted of a female nude.  Certainly the painting has as much to say about European attitudes toward the Mideast as anything produced by Gérôme.  Would Sargent ever have attributed to a Western woman the overt sensuality with which he imbues his Egyptian model, or would he have been too afraid of offending staid European proprieties?

The book is profusely illustrated but too many of the paintings are reproduced in monochrome rather than color and are often in too small a size to be conveniently studied.  And some major works are inexplicably left out altogether.  Most notable among these omissions is the portrait of Edwin Booth, a penetrating study that captured very well the dilemma faced by this great actor who was forever haunted by his brother's crime.  Instead, too much prominence is given to what really are no more than routine society portraits.  Granted, though, some of these commissions, such as Lady Agnew of Lochnaw are masterpieces of the genre.

The epilogue, which deals with the circumstances surrounding the painting of the Sitwell portrait, seems anticlimactic and a non sequitur.  This was not one of Sargent's most significant works and he had no special attachment to the Sitwells who were, to say the least, a rather idiosyncratic family.  Though the children, particularly Edith, went on to become prominent in mid-twentieth century British literary circles, that was long after Sargent had passed on and was in no way the result of his influence.