Part 14
Just as important as the design is the color scheme. It is, in fact, so prominent that the title of the picture is often derived from it. “The Green Gown” or “The Blue Bowl” are hints that green or blue is the key in which the picture is pitched. The continuance or repetition or perhaps slight variance of the green or blue runs through the whole picture and produces what is called a tone or harmony or symphony in green or blue. The aim with Alexander is precisely as with Whistler. Neither of them harps on the one note to the exclusion of every other, but the one note nevertheless prevails throughout. The picture by Alexander called “The Rose” shows a young girl in dull green which would be monotonous if insisted upon everywhere. It is relieved by the pink of the flesh, the dark hair, the white linen, but above all by the rose which the girl holds in her hand. The rose hue is in the same tone of light as the green and emphasizes the latter because red is the complementary color of green.
The appearance of complementary or slightly varying colors in the central high lights argues the prevalence of a large half-tone in the background and intermediate spaces. This half-tone when prepared in a thin medium like petroleum and used upon a soft or absorbent canvas sinks into the canvas, becomes an atmospheric depth, becomes vague, indefinite, mysterious. To avoid too much monotony of half-tone Alexander very often introduced a burst of light upon the figure. This sounds like the old Rembrandt-Lenbach formula which he followed in his early student days at Munich, but his later practice diffused the illumination, made it less hard on the edges, and more atmospheric. Even in certain pictures where a ray of sunshine is shot into a dark room through an unlatched door the ray is not hard and the half-tone gives it an atmospheric setting quite extraordinary.
Under these peculiar conditions of canvas, of tone, of illumination, the drawing is often flattened, even abbreviated. The heads and costumes are brushed in broadly, the hands are sometimes passed over with a mere suggestion of form or value, the accessories are still more vague in line, in bulk, in texture. Nothing but things of vital importance are given. By suppression of the parts the painter gets concentration on certain salient features of surface, or light or color. With thin painting in the ground and shadows and fat painting in the high lights the picture takes on the look of a large and easily done sketch. A feeling of freedom, of spontaneity, is apparent, and with it life, spirit, gusto in the recital.
There was more or less variation of this sketch-appearance in all Alexander’s late canvases. Sometimes he drew with sharper edges and more protrusive modelling and produced a more realistic effect; but far oftener he gave merely a suggestion of form or created an atmospheric nimbus with his tone that surrounded and enveloped the figure. It has been frequently noted in these pages that almost every painter oscillates between too much drawing and not enough. When Alexander dismissed his form rather summarily for a tone or a texture, his critics declared him vague, shadowy, merely decorative; when he insisted upon the drawing and perhaps minimized his tone, he was declared prosaic. He did not have to be told that he was between the devil and the deep sea. Every painter knows it, or comes to know it, before he has struggled through many canvases.
A more frequent comment on Alexander was that he was a painter of attitudes and draperies--nature plus a pose. To avoid the conventional he chose the accidental and the momentary rather than the characteristic or permanent. He was seeking the decorative, and his girl in green or gray or yellow was just a little more elegantly disposed than in nature. It was frankly an “arrangement”--a placing of the figure and a disposition of the accessories to the best advantage. The robes were swung in gracefully with no sharp angle lines or crabbed pothooks to break the flow. The photographer of to-day seeks to produce the same graceful exaggeration but with less success. And the realist who depicts the charwoman bending over the ash-barrel usually exaggerates more positively the other way. If the beauty of the ugly in an awkward pose may be accounted art, why not the beauty of the charming in a graceful pose? Alexander got what he could out of his handsome model, making her a little more graceful than reality, to be sure, but did not Van Dyck, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, do the same thing with marked success?
His portrait sitters differed from his abstract types holding a ring or a blue bowl or a rose chiefly in the matter of a facial likeness. The “arrangement” was carried out with the one as with the other, though it was usually not so conspicuous in the portrait as in the type. Perhaps because the costume and coloring of women were more adaptable to the “arrangement” than the costume and coloring of men, the painter achieved the reputation of being more successful with the former as sitters than with the latter. Certainly in his most attractive portraits of women he has not failed to use graceful composition, and has gotten much pictorial effect out of his color, tone, and light. The “Mrs. Hastings,” for instance, is both portrait and picture. It is expectant in look and lively in spirit. The pose in profile, which is repeated vaguely in the Winged Victory back of the figure, is complemented by a color and a tone quite in keeping. It is one of the painter’s best efforts. The “Mrs. Duryea” is perhaps a little more conscious in its formality. The space is not so well filled and the dress spreads too obviously. With the “Mrs. Ledyard Blair” the dress again spreads for decorative effect and becomes pronounced in importance. A similar result is apparent in the portrait known as the “Woman in Gray” now in the Luxembourg. All of these last-mentioned portraits have excellences quite aside from their decorative planning, and the “Woman in Gray” had much to do in creating Alexander’s vogue in Paris; but one turns from them to the refined simplicity of the “Miss Dorothy Roosevelt” with some relief. Sometimes nature is not the better for being “arranged.”
When it was necessary to insist upon characterization Alexander could do it, and do it well. The “Mrs. Wheaton,” an old lady with gray hair and lace cap, done in 1904, is excellent in its gentle (not brutal) realization of the model. It is quite in the class with the Whistler and Chase mother portraits, and in refinement is perhaps superior to either of the others. The children canvases of “Eleanor Alexander” with the doll in the chair or “Geraldine Russell” standing at full length are equally good.
It is true enough that the grace and charm belonging to women and children seemed to appeal to Alexander more than the sturdier qualities of men. He painted many men but they were not always as forceful as the “Fritz Thaulow.” That figure has bulk and body to it but again no brutality. It is more forceful than the “Walt Whitman,” which is just a little too much ironed out and smoothed down for the vociferous original. The beard and hair and _soi-disant_ look are those of a poet rather than Whitman--a distinction with a difference to some people. The “Dr. Patton” in academic robes as president of Princeton is probably as satisfactory as any of Alexander’s portraits of men. It is a simple, well-drawn, convincing presentation, not surprising in any way nor again falling short in any way.
All of this work is simple, large in design, not confused with detail or small objects, and always with ample breathing room. Alexander attempted no elaborate grouping or historical composition except in his designs for mural decoration. The earlier pictures such as “Pandora” and “The Pot of Basil” are merely single figures. “The Piano” is a single figure with a piano, the “Memories” is two figures, as is also the “Music Panel.” They are all spacious and do not crowd the canvas or the frame. Occasionally he did landscapes--some of them up in the hills about Cornish, New Hampshire--in which there is the same simplicity of design and feeling of space in hillside, valley, and sky. His landscapes have a decorative swing of line similar in kind to his figure pictures, and there is something of the same tonal effect, though less pronounced. In other words, the painter saw or read the decorative into landscape as into figures, which may be considered a mistake if one is looking for a realistic presentation, but is just as certainly a success if one is looking for something to hang upon the wall that shall not clash with every other object in the room.
[Illustration: “Walt Whitman” by John W. Alexander.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]
Therein lies a marked feature of Alexander’s work. It is art that can be lived with. It takes its place in the household and accommodates itself to almost any color scheme because of its neutral tone and lack of glittering notes. How many modern easel pictures are keyed up to the shrieking point, and are planned to outshriek their neighbors in an exhibition! They are Salon pictures--“machines” that make a clatter and having served their purpose go back to the studio and are faced against the wainscoting. But Alexander’s pictures could be taken home without danger of a family quarrel. They are delicate enough in pattern to go in the drawing-room and refined enough in manner to be seen and not heard.
Perhaps this very quality of refinement, so acceptable in his easel pictures, was something of a defect in his mural decorations. The greatly enlarged wall space of a public building called for more intensity of color, more sharp contrast of angle lines, more loftiness and elaborateness of composition than the painter dreamt of in his art philosophy. His attempts at mural painting were somewhat sporadic. It was not exactly his _métier_, and though he took it up with energy when asked to do so, he succeeded in producing little more than an enlargement of his easel pictures. The same tone, light, and color of his portraits and single figures went into the groupings in the Congressional Library, the Harrisburg Capitol, and the Carnegie Institute at Pittsburgh. The Library decorations gave the “Evolution of the Book” in six lunettes that illustrated the stages of book-making rather than symbolized or epitomized them. At Harrisburg the theme was the “Evolution of the State,” another set of fourteen lunettes. The decoration at Pittsburgh was the most ambitious performance of the three and sought to tell the story of Pittsburgh--the story of steel and labor. It is called the “Apotheosis of Pittsburgh,” with the city personified by a knight in armor with a flaming sword in his hand instead of the large female figure of conventional decoration. The panels carry over three stories of the entrance-hall of the Carnegie Institute and some five hundred figures are used. The first floor shows the half-naked furnacemen at work amid smoke, steam, and fire glare. The smoke and steam rise up and envelop, make an atmospheric setting for, the allegorical figures of the second floor that from all sides are bringing tributes to the mailed figure of Pittsburgh. The allegorical figures are winged, robed in long trailing garments, and drift lightly through the air or upon clouds. The third floor contains lunettes typifying the arts and sciences.
The whole decoration is well thought out, and is put together, within its framings of yellowish marble, with a distinctly decorative effect. The tone of it is quiet, subdued, restful--perhaps too much so. The figures are graceful, even the men--again, perhaps too much so. One is not sorry that Labor is shown with cheerful face and normal body rather than sad-browed, nerve-racked, and body-wrecked, after the Zola-Meunier formula. That exaggeration has become just as conventional and wearisome as the prettiness of Bouguereau, or the pettiness of Meissonier. But Alexander’s workers are perhaps too elegant for reality as his floating figures are too graceful for allegory. There is a feeling that there is not enough mental grip about them. It is paradoxical to say that the decoration is too decorative, but that states the case quite rightly. The pattern and the color that set off an easel picture appropriately fail to carry when employed on so vast a scale of wall decoration--fail to carry from sheer attenuation of motive and design. The Pittsburgh decoration has not enough strength behind it to spread over five thousand feet of painted surface. Strength was never a quality of Alexander’s art. He had skill, grace, refinement, charm, style, but he never attempted to win by force or power.
After his return from Paris in 1901 he took up his permanent residence in New York and immediately entered into the art life of the city and the country. He had received gold medals at Paris and St. Louis and the Legion of Honor from France, had placed his pictures in public galleries all the way from St. Petersburg and Odessa to Chicago, and had become a member of some twenty art societies. In addition to the McDowell Club and the School Art League he was the head of the Federation of Fine Arts, the Society of Mural Painters, and from 1909 the president of the National Academy of Design. His interest in art movements was great and the energy he gave to them was at the expense not only of his painting but his health. As president of the Academy of Design his devotion was unflagging even though it met with almost everything but encouragement and success. During his presidency he took up anew the problem of a building site which had been dragging along for years. There had been failure in Fifty-seventh Street in 1896, and over the Lenox Library plot in 1904, but Alexander failed four further times with the sites of the Arsenal, the Central Park, Bryant Park, and the Railroad Yard.
This with many other burdens he was carrying helped to wear him out. He had never been robust. On the contrary, he was of delicate, refined physique and possessed of a mental energy that far outran his bodily strength. Moreover, he never knew how to spare himself. In his last years with many overhead burdens to carry he could still take on new enterprises. At Onteora, where he had a summer home, he became much interested in costuming and decorative settings for the theatre, and later, with Mrs. Alexander, made many designs for Miss Maude Adams’s productions of “Jeanne d’Arc,” “Peter Pan,” “Chantecler,” and “The Little Minister.” In New York he presided over the National Institute of Arts and Letters, spoke at every gathering of art people, and was at the beck and call of society whenever anything of an artistic nature was desired. At the last--that is, in 1915--death came to him quite suddenly.
Both socially and artistically Alexander had become a man of distinction. Every one liked his refined, gentlemanly personality, admired his art, and listened to his counsel. For these reasons and because of his commanding position he came to have a strong influence in all art matters. He had set a pattern that many of the younger painters followed, and, like Chase, had helped to establish the latter-day tradition of craftsmanship here in America. It was not the exact craftsmanship of Chase or Alexander or Sargent that was established, though each of them has had his imitators. The movement for sound technical education in American art was of no one painter’s devising. The three were typical of the movement, but there were others--Weir, Twachtman, Beckwith, Blum, Brush, Thayer, Dewing, Cox, Blashfield--who were of the same faith and who added their quota of strength. All of them working together, with a common energy and enthusiasm, have created a body of belief as to what constitutes style and skill in art. They have established a tradition based in sound craftsmanship than which nothing could be safer or better for the future of American art. It was Alexander’s part to help lay the foundation-stones. War or national madness or economic change may prevent any splendid palace of art arising therefrom, but at least Alexander and his contemporaries builded the firm foundation--builded perhaps better than they knew.
X
JOHN S. SARGENT
The major events in Mr. Sargent’s life as we read them or hear them told to-day seem in no way striking or startling. He has moved along well-trodden paths, in a well-ordered career, responsive always to the teaching of his youth, and reflective of his social and intellectual surroundings. He did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born to him and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. He came to it early, grew up in its atmosphere, and was under its spell at an impressionable age. Which is to say that he is not a self-made painter in the Inness-Wyant sense, but something of a traditional painter in the La Farge sense. Training started him aright, but his great success is, of course, not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the remarkable content of his work.
He was born in Florence in 1856. His parents were Americans residing in Italy at the time of his birth. The father was from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had studied medicine in Philadelphia, afterward remaining in the latter city to practise his profession. He had met and married a Miss Singer of an old Philadelphia family, and later they had gone to Florence to live. Legally, therefore, the painter is an American, but the legal tie is about all that binds him to us. We like to claim him because he is a celebrity, but in reality he is an American only in a nominal way. He was not reared or educated here, he has not lived here, he has not fought in our quarrels or failed in our failures or succeeded in our successes. The greater part of his life has been passed abroad amid other scenes and other peoples. As a boy he travelled about Europe with his parents, speaking German as his first acquired language, if I report him aright, and gaining the bulk of his schooling in Italy and Germany. At eighteen he went to Paris and entered the _atelier_ of Carolus Duran--at that time perhaps the most famous of the French portrait-painters. It was not until 1876, when Sargent was twenty years old, that he saw the shores of the United States. That was his first visit. He did not stay for any length of time, and what were his impressions of the land and the people we do not know. Several times since then he has been here for short periods, but one or another of the large European capitals has been his residence. Since 1884 his permanent abiding-place has been London, though he lived for a time in Paris, and just now (1918) he is again here in America.
It would seem then that however much pride we may take in Sargent’s achievements we can hardly be proud because he is peculiarly our own. He is not American in the sense of knowing the land and the people and reflecting our life and civilization. Just as little has his birth in Italy made him Italian or his residence in France and England made him French or English. No country can claim him, no people can appropriate him, for in reality he is a citizen of the world at large--the manner of man we sometimes call a cosmopolite. If there is one place above another that he can be traced to and said to emanate from it is Paris; and Paris is no longer merely the first city of France. It, too, has become cosmopolitan--the centre of modern life and the gathering-place of the world’s knowledge, intelligence, and fashion. Sargent reflects its taste and its skill, but not anything else that is peculiarly French, not anything that smacks of the French soil. The accomplishments of Paris are his, but without the sentiment or the feeling that is French.
It is questionable if a man who is equally at home in London, Paris, Florence, and New York will or can have a very strong sentiment about any one of those places. He can hardly spend a winter in the United States and become vitally interested in democracy, and the next winter go to England and fall deeply in love with aristocracy. Nor can he live for a few months in Spain or Germany and penetrate to the quick the life and character of its people. The cosmopolite who moves hither and yon about the globe hardly ever takes to heart the affairs and interests of those with whom he is temporarily sojourning. On the contrary, it is rather his attitude of mind that nothing is to be taken too seriously. To ruffle one’s composure with an emotion or to worry one’s self about a sentiment is the very thing he seeks to avoid. He accepts the facts as facts, concerns himself with the appearance of things, is a stickler for the refinements, and a great student of manners, methods, and styles. He quickly absorbs whatsoever is artistic or intelligent or learned, his perceptions are very acute, his knowledge and manner are polished to the last degree; but the strong feeling that, after all, lies at the bottom of great endeavor finds no utterance in his work, and the national beliefs that are really the insistent and persistent things in both literature and art are not the mainspring of his action.
So much may be said in a general way about the painter we are considering; and so much without a thought of either praise or blame. Mr. Sargent’s life has been the result of peculiar circumstances--fortunate circumstances some may think, or perhaps unfortunate, as others may hold. At least they have been instrumental in bringing forth an accomplished painter whose art no one can fail to admire. That his work may be admired understandingly it is quite necessary to comprehend the personality of the artist--to understand his education, his associations, his artistic and social environments. For if the man himself is cosmopolitan his art is not less so. It is the perfection of world-style, the finality of method. It is learned to an extraordinary degree, accurate, scientific, almost faultless; but it belongs to no country, reflects no people, discloses no sentiment, and causes no emotion. It is calmly intellectual and begets enthusiasm only for its absolute truthfulness to appearance and the brilliant facility of its achievement.
To behold and to accomplish--that is to see and to paint--seem to have been Sargent’s ambition from the start. What gave his original impetus toward art is not disclosed, but his mother was a clever person with water-colors, and she may have prompted his interest in painting. At any rate, he early became proficient in drawing. As a boy, sketching in the Tyrol, Leighton saw his work and remarked its skill. Later on he was entered as a pupil in the schools of the Florence Academy. Travelling at vacation times with his parents he saw many pictures and doubtless studied the old masters from many angles. Everywhere among the Renaissance painters he must have remarked the skilled craftsman, and perhaps his early aspirations were to excel as they had excelled. Certainly it was with no little knowledge of drawing that he presented himself at the Paris _atelier_ of Carolus Duran in 1874, aged eighteen.