John Singer Sargent in His Studio

SO YOU want to be a portrait painter. Bad business. Better not. I know nothing of the schools in Paris. So long ago. Tonks is a good teacher of drawing at the Slade.”

Such were Sargent’s welcoming words when I was sent to him by my Uncle Henry for advice about art schools. Sargent was tall, broad, and heavy, with eyes fairly starting from his head, as was but natural in such practiced organs of vision. After desultory conversation with this inarticulate youth, he was driven to remark:

“I would advise you not to admire too much the work of any contemporary painter.”

“Contemporary painter?”

“Well — such, we’ll say, as Whistler!”

I then departed without confessing that my danger lay not in admiration of Whistler, but of J. S. S. himself.

In 1901 a proposal was afoot at Harvard to have President Eliot’s portrait painted by Sargent. The canvas was to be a companion to the superb one he had already painted of Henry Lee Higginson. They were both to hang in the Harvard Union, Higginson’s gift to the college. Faculty and student subscription was to pay for the portrait, and I collected money in Matthews Hall, where I then lived.

Some years later, again in Sargent’s studio in London, I asked to see the Eliot portrait.

“Oh, terrible, terrible! He arrived without his gown, with only ten days for sittings. I put him in an Oxford gown and painted his head and hands. We cabled for the Harvard gown, but when it arrived, it turned out to be a skimpy little thing which involved changes. And, the photographs of the stage in Sanders Theater. Impossible! Impossible!” Eliot’s great moment was held to be when he conferred honorary degrees in Sanders Theater. The background of the Sanders stage was large yellow oak brackets supporting a gallery. This bit of Van Brunt architecture was too much for Sargent, and he avoided it by painting stone steps, a balustrade, and trees from an Italian painting he had made.

When the canvas arrived in Cambridge it was bitterly criticized by William Roscoe Thayer, George Herbert Palmer, and others. There were no Italian backgrounds in or near Cambridge; Eliot never wore patent leather shoes. Palmer started a faculty petition to have the portrait destroyed. It was dropped after reaching my father, who refused to sign. Wilton Lockwood, the painter, commented, “If they don’t destroy that picture the time will come when it will be the greatest known monument to Eliot.” For years it was kept in the shade, whence it emerged to Archibald Coolidge’s office in Widener when Sargent’s sister, Miss Emily, expressed a desire to see it. It is still difficult to find.

Sargent in Paris at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two was the most promising pupil of Carolus Duran. For a number of successive years the canvases he sent to the Salon were recognized as the paintings of the year. He then invited the reigning beauty of Paris to pose for him, Madame X (Madame Gautereau). French critics had had too much of the young American, and when Madame X came along, French nationalism revolted. They tore the painting apart, calling it clay-colored, indecent, and abominable. The mother of the famous beauty was in tears and begged Sargent to remove the picture from the Salon. He refused on the ground that that was something that was never done. I believe the trouble over Madame X was one of Sargent’s reasons for moving to London, although he once remarked, “I really am a Frenchman.” Later, when Robinson of the Metropolitan asked him for a canvas, he replied, have only one ‘thing,’ the portrait of a certain Madame X — perhaps the best I ever painted, which you may have for $15,000.”

Years later Sargent came to Boston to install his murals for the public library and to work on decorations for the Museum of Fine Arts. He remarked at the time, “I am not so much interested any more in painting anything just the way it looks. I would now rather paint something in the nature of a Wedgwood plaque.” His panel now at the Widener Library of a cowled figure of Death clasping a dying soldier who holds aloft a female Victory is of this nature. His interest in portraiture and “just the way it looks” had been eroded by the compromises involved in pleasing clients. In spite of this, he was prevailed upon to paint the portrait of A. Lawrence Lowell, then president of Harvard. Since my studio at 132 The Riverway was more favorable for this work than was his at Columbus Avenue, he borrowed it for the work on Lowell and asked me to be present at the sittings, partly, I think, to save him from having to talk while working, and partly that I might learn as an observer.

At the first sitting he placed Lowell, in charcoal, on the white canvas. Later Sargent came alone and spent a morning filling the grain of the canvas with burnt sienna and ultramarine. He was using an inch-wide scrubbing brush and a medium which contained, I believe, some element of varnish or stand oil. While at work on this slow and careful process, in which no white paint was involved, he said over his shoulder, “You are troubled by false accents. Thayer was troubled with them, too.” I said, “I know. I know. Terrible. But what do you do to get rid of them?” The answer involved a succinct definition of his own craft procedure.

“First you classify the values. Then you work from the middle tone up toward the lights and down toward the darks. Carolus Duran taught that. He couldn’t do it himself, but he could teach it. It is hard, but it was the procedure of Frans Hals and Velasquez, and it is the best method if you wish to carry anything far in oil paint. It is hard to find anyone who knew more about oil paint than Frans Hals. In a sketch, false accents may sit about, but in anything to be carried far they make trouble.”

Here was Sargent’s technique, the technique which for him was the “road in” and which made him a master craftsman at twenty-five. His words are simple enough, yet they shroud mysteries. Why, if Carolus could teach it, was he unable to do it himself? And why, if Carolus could teach it, was Sargent alone among his pupils to learn it? And why, when Sargent was painting Lowell, did he turn to me and say, “I am not following my own precepts.” He was placing a high light too soon. After his years of experience, the method was still “hard” for him.

The key to the mystery lies in his phrase “First you classify the values.” This means that before beginning to paint, you pass an abstract judgment on the “values” — the tones of light and dark in your subject. These are the darkest darks, these the lesser darks. These the lights. These the high lights. And there will be intermediates. Nor do you start with extremes of tone. You work from the middle tone, up and down, that you may be carrying your drawing correctly. If this procedure is successfully carried out, every tone will be in an observed relation to every other, and your paintingwill bear the same relation to the subject “out there” that a piece of transposed music bears to the piece in the original key. Transposition is required because the gamut of light and dark in oil paint is smaller than the corresponding gamut in nature. The surprise is that this approach is more true to nature than when the tones are “copied” piecemeal. The result is truth of relation.

The master who instinctively understood this principle was Piero della Francesca. I am not saying that he was greater than Michelangelo or Raphael, but I do hold that his insight into tone relations in his frescoes of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba achieves a drama of tonal contrast unknown to his two great successors. Raphael should have been ashamed to paint over Piero’s work.

I have been referring, of course, to what is called “representational” or “tonal” painting. Why should some of us value it so highly? Not only because much of the greatest work for centuries has been executed in that mode, but because it permits representation of the subject in three dimensions plus the very color and mystery of the atmosphere in which it floats. Modernists, who scorn it, say, “It has been done — time for something different.” “It” doesn’t exist because the work of every master is as individual as his handwriting or the color of his eyes. If “it” has been done, it is surely a relief not to have to bother with anything so complex and difficult.