Sargent

At 8 o'clock one morning during the past week, a young housemaid went up the stairs of a big London house to awaken her master, John Singer Sargent. She found him dead on his pillow with a volume spread open, face down, on the reading table beside him. Physicians who arrived to pronounce the inevitable, grisly abracadabra, said that he had died in his sleep of an apoplectic seizure. So, at the age of 69, ended the life of an eminent and talented gentleman who has been recognized for the last 30 years as the greatest portrait painter of his period.

John Singer Sargent died once before, in 1899. He was killed in the office of a British newspaper syndicate and had the pleasure, next day, of reading florid obituaries of himself in the English and Continental press. He read how he, the son of a New England physician, had been born in Florence, Italy, studied art in France, painted a portrait of his teacher, Carolus Duran, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1877 and made him famous at 21. He read of the many commissions that were showered upon him from the month of that first success to the moment of his lamentable assassination by the syndicate's reporter. He ran his eye through wads of anecdote apotheosizing his commendable arrogance, his cosmopolitanism, his indifference to money; he scanned columns of doting verbiage in which criticasters acclaimed him as "The Modern Velasquez," "The Modern Van Dyck," mourned him as a mortal but set him among the gods, his head on Abraham's bosom, his feet in Titian's lap. He smiled.

The epitaphery published in the press of the U. S. last week would have taken him longer to read. Merely a list of his sitters is a comprehensive British and U. S. Hall of Fame of the last half century. Statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, John Hay; men of affairs like Lord Ribblesdale, Theodore Roosevelt; actors, actresses like Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Ada Rehan, Ellen Terry; authors, educators, beauties, generals, industrialists. Though he announced in 1903 that he would paint no more portraits, he occasionally broke his rule, twice to make it possible for future generations to scrutinize the incomparable countenance of John D. Rockefeller.

In his later years, he worked much in charcoal, in watercolor. His murals have manifested his passion for pure beauty in line, form and color. His industry never dwindled; it remained to the last as great as that of an artist who would never achieve anything. This fact was pungently observed by a woman who came upon Sargent doing a watercolor by a Hampshire wayside, stood, for several minutes, watching him. "Why do people imagine they can paint? There's a man whose hair is turning gray . . . ."

It was said, last week, that Sargent was the only contemporary painter who could make an important honor appear silly by receiving it; that there is a picture of his in every museum in the world that has been able to secure one; that the British National Gallery, hitherto reserved for those artists whose respectability has been fortified by death, gave a room to his paintings of the Wertheimer family.

Yet, should he once more regard as unconvincing the gossip of his demise and insult the authority of the press by surviving to criticize his obituaries, it is highly probable that he would smile. His modesty was great; he did not believe that he belonged among the great masters.

He knew that few dead painters and no living ones surpassed him as a technician. He knew that his method was his own, that he had once been jibed in Tory fastnesses as "Mr. Sargent, the arch corrupter of portrait painters in this matter of blatant objectivity." He knew that he could analyze a lump of humanity with the dexterity of a psychologist and present the result of his inquiries with the suavity of a novelist. He knew that he was a very able man who had made himself great. Critics acclaim him far above his own modest opinion.

That posterity can fail to estimate favorably his facility, his intellect, is improbable. But whether the discerning critics of the future will confirm the majestic prestige which is his present investiture will depend upon their opinion of the respective values of critical and creative art. Sargent was not a creative painter; life did not impress him as an impassioned and significant gesture, but as a collision of surfaces whose irridescences it pleased him to reproduce. Those appraisers who try to bracket him with Frans Hals, the robust Dutchman, would do well to remember the book that the little housemaid saw spread open, face down, beside the bed from which she could not rouse him. It was a volume of Voltaire.