Every once in awhile Sargent did something different than paint portraits of women fully adorned and expressed in their clothing and of men who look rather craggy and whose clothes cover them rather than individuate them, a distinction that still holds, at least when women dress up for gala events like the Oscars. Sargent always went back to his true calling of realistic portraiture even when it had become a burden, his portrait of Woodrow Wilson capturing at least as much of the man as the photographs made of him at the time. It was a last gasp of the realistic eye in portraiture. Sargent’s experiments are interesting because they point out the roads not taken and because they show Sargent’s profound understanding of the art movements that were swirling around him in the course of his career, and so give reason to think that his art was chosen rather than the only thing he could have done,
Sargent retained his realism and never became an Impressionist even though he seems to have outlived his greatest period when he was painting all those portraits of society women, and even though he did flirt with a late Impressionist style when he used white dashes to give some of his later paintings an Impressionist texture in that the painting technique itself becomes more important than its subject matter. That Sargent did not dig more deeply into Impressionism is a surprise in that he was in the generation that followed Manet, whose breakout year had been 1863, when he showed both “Luncheon on the Grass” and “Olympia”, Sargent, for his part, breaking out in 1882 with his “El Jaleo”, a portrait of a Spanish dancer, before settling into his career as a commercial painter. Why this resistance to what was everywhere in the air?
I would suggest that the answer to that question is that on some occasions Sargent did respond to the call of early Impressionism, but did not stick with it because for all the tiresomeness of producing one portrait after another, this was the heart of his calling, which was to show both men and women for what they were rather than for what they could become because of the illusions painting could create. The essence of early Impressionism was to use angle and color to bring out the individuality of a subject, as was the case where the reflections of Manet’s “Bar Girl at the Folies Bergere” allows him to look into how she looks when she is caught unaware, within herself, or, in Monet’s case, in “Garden at Sainte Adresse”, where the singular life of the bourgeoisie is invoked through taking up an encompassing angle to show how they have arranged their surroundings, built a garden, so that looking out at the seashore becomes a comfortable leisure activity.
Sargent uses angles and colors in a different way, which is to deconstruct the geometry that is at the heart of the early Impressionist enterprise. In “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, from 1895, when Sargent is very busy with his portraits, the picture is of two young girls facing one another but not looking at one another, looking instead at the lanterns they are holding in their hands, which give off the orange glow that would come from candles having been placed inside of them. There are other lanterns about and so the story of the picture is that the girls are preparing lanterns for some festivities. The girls stand amidst and below white flowers as well as lanterns, the buds of such flowers all over the unmown grass in which the girls stand. But rather than just being a sentimental picture of young girls at play, the picture makes it difficult to get one’s bearing on it. The two girls might be looking at one another through a window or even serve as mirror images, though there is no mirror. There is no clear ground for the picture either in that the white on grass look goes on throughout the picture, top to bottom, left to right. The lanterns provide no relief, do not provide an orientation, because they too are in many parts of the picture. So what Sargent has done is to rid his picture of perspective even if he does not violate its rules. Rather, the mood is what ties the picture together because Sargent has deliberately removed reminders of its geometry. What emerges is a place suffused with its moment, only the concentration of the girls giving it a centrality it does not otherwise deserve. Human consciousness rather than geometry supplies order. Geometry, for the duration of the time spent looking at the picture, has been suspended.
Sargent, I assume, does not do this so as to score philosophical points, to weigh in on the question of the nature of geometry and its place in reality. Rather, it is to create an artistic effect which is quite unusual and quite different from the careful attention to geometry by the Impressionists and by Tissot, his fellow portraitist, who is extremely careful about geometric validity in both his portraits and his other paintings. This, I think, would have been a departure in painting much deeper than the one made by the pre-Raphaelites who wanted just to flatten out the canvas or even by the Modernists who either wanted, like Mondrian, to see the canvas as the painting itself rather than a window into a representation, or Picasso, whose weird shapes are there to get at the psychological reality of how internal organs can get rearranged and externalized to better understand the person. If one looks ahead, beyond Modernism, Sargent is intimating the later pictures of David Hockney, who opens up the geometry of a house in his series on a blue terrace so that it is seen as a flat cutout of its three dimensions, those “architectural plans” held together by the foliage that Hockney supplies.
This is not the only painting in which Sargent pulls of this trick of getting geometry out of his representations. He does so later in his career, in 1909, with “Black Brook”, which also muddies perspective by having his model sit on a bed of flowers which move from the top to the bottom of the picture on the left and next to the brook on the right of the picture where the water appears black and that part of the picture ios dominated by the rocks that show through the water. So there is a contrast between left and right rather than a movement into distance, as if the artist had no need of geometry to make the shapes and representations in his painting clear, which is a kind of triump for painting minimalism: don’t use all of the tools the history of painting has given you; be clever and improvise.
The most interesting thing about the painting, though, is its subject. The young girl (the model is a young niece who is just fifteen) looks distracted, concerned with her innermost thoughts or feelings and having little sense of what is outside of her. Additional information that this is the case is Sargent’s careful moelling of her hands, the fingers slim and intertwined as if she were contending with some inner grief. This expression and the distancing it provides between the model and her setting is reminiscent of an art movement completely different than what Sargent usually does. It is the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, known for its interest in languishing maidens put in medieval and mythological settings and also known for the richness of its color even though it did adhere to a conventional geometry.
A good comparison to Sargent is provided by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Proserpine”, painted in 1874, when Sargent was still a student, and so raises the question of why Sargent did not fall into becoming a pre-raphaelite. Rossetti’s picture also shows a distracted figure, this time sumptuously dressed in red velvet, perhaps evaluating her fate as the mythological story of her condemned to six months a year in hell would suggest, she holding the fruit from which she had eaten, that having constituted her sin. But Sargent has no need of a myth or any accompanying interpretation to convey the emotion of despair. He just shows it in how the model looks and sits, and so, if one cares to, Sargent’s painting can be considered a criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite requirement for exoticism of subject and setting to provide emotional power, and also a validation of the fact that he looks directly at women rather than through a literary lens, and so is true to his realism even if he is playing with issues of geometry.
It is also possible to make the case that Sargent not only distinguished himself from French Impressionism and the English Pre-Raphaelites, but also the oncoming revolution of Van Gogh, who distorted space and found new colors to render his singularly poignant, tragic, and scary view of the entire universe, whether that was a rented room or the heavens. Van Gogh did that in the 1880’s at the time when Sargent, already very well known, had not yet embarked on his most important and characteristic portraits of society ladies. Van Gogh may have been looking for salvation while Sargent was looking for commissions, but Sargent was deeply into the nature of his craft and so might well have wanted to try out other techniques, which he did, in this case, in “Gordon Fairchild”. There, he shows a young boy scrunched up in a wooden chair, just as a young boy might do. The outline of the chair is what gives shape to the picture, the boy accommodating to it, his face not well drawn, Sargent having given up on the painting, not thinking it a significant work. It is significant, however, in that it is another road not taken. Rather than exploring the interplay between the geometry of the boy and the chair, which would have given the chair the same live quality that Van Gogh finds in pieces of furniture, Sargent finds the exercise unsatisfying, perhaps because geometry was not his thing and also because philosophy was not on his mind.
Sargent thus abandons what we might call the Dutch model (though Van Gogh hardly was part of a school) as well as the English and the French models for painting, and he also does not adopt the practice of the American realist, Thomas Eakins, who specializes in ensemble scenes of boxers and doctors and bathers. Instead, he always comes back to the full frontal portrait, the woman highly glamorized, this technique seemingly so conventional that it is hard to recognize it as an individual style except that so few other artists are drawn to it, however much our imagination of Sargent discussing the dress a subject will wear, or posing her, or her patiently sitting through the occasion of a sitting, are part of the repertoire of what we think is the process of making a commissioned portrait, which is so different from setting up for a plein de air landscape or a street scene caught out a window. It is so easy to be caught up in his life as an artist that one neglects to concentrate on the sheer beauty of the paintings.