John Sargent

His father, a distinguished surgeon of Puritan spine, wanted him to join the Navy. But his mother was musical and did water colors. Besides, he was brought up traveling abroad, where talented young pencils itch in the art galleries. So John Singer Sargent* became a painter.

That he became perhaps the greatest painter ever born of U. S. parents was due in part to inheritance from a father whose very integrity overruled his prejudice against what, in 1870 when John Sargent was 14, was regarded as a profession not quite respectable.

The upright father even decided in favor of naughty Paris. He had faith in his son. Never was faith better placed. Under Carolus Duran, dutiful young John Sargent so "persevered in the Pine Arts" that he had no time for Parisian gaiety. In a negligee Bohemia his dress remained correct. Amid fads and fashions ornate, voluptuous, bizarre, he followed only Frans Hals and Velasquez. He learned, thoroughly, to build on true middle values, to accent with strictest simplicity.

He migrated naturally to England, tilting his easel outside a Cotswold cottage wherein Henry James and Edmund Gos.se were busy writing. He painted Stevenson pacing thoughtfully in velveteen jacket. He took Whistler's egg-colored studio in Tite Street, London, and deprecated with amused humility a chorus of praise that arose, swelled and continued without interruption during his life.

Max Beerbohm caricatured the queue of fashionables awaiting a sitting at Sargent's door and Sargent grew to say "paughtraits" in mock disgust. The Boston Library and Harvard gave him splendid scope for his genius on their walls. Yet for "paughtraits" he continued most famous. His President Wilson fetched $50,000. Some day, perhaps, his landscapes will bring the like. He was an outdoor man, a sketcher in the Alps, Tyrol, Rockies. Pre-Raphaelitism, or any ism omitting the air and light or nature, were incomprehensible to him.

John Sargent died in 1923, reading peacefully one evening in his London bed. An artist who transplanted a half-acre of roses for a garden picture, and carried a stuffed gazelle about Europe for another work, he was painstaking. A Victorian who said, "Ruskin, don t you know--rocks and clouds--silly old thing", he had critical independence. An observer who called English trees "old Victorian ladies going perpetually to church in a land where it is always Sunday afternoon," he was more whimsy-realistic than imaginative. An artist who, to fasten the attention of a restless, primitive Spanish model (Dancer Carmencita), painted his nose red and ate his cigar, he had ingenuity, humor. An erect, burly, bearded man who waited days to cool off before thrashing an abusive farmer, _ he was gentle, temperate, poised, just. A portraitist who could block out, build up, polish and accent an oil masterpiece in one sitting, with never any weak "teasing up" or dishonest glossing over, he had the disciplined intensity of genius truly great. . . .

This biography, however, is by a friend too close to attempt a creative study. John Sargent the personality, John Sargent the painter, will have to be extracted by specialists from Author Charteris' careful compilation of letters and conversations. Yet a reader with patience or devotion can extract at least an estimate, a rough sketch on a grand scale, from John Sargent's own turns of phrase and thought, from bits of rich human pigment which Author Charteris, if he does fail to fuse them, leaves pure and undabbled.

* JOHN SARGENT--Hon. Evan Charteris--Scribners ($6).