Painter of Appearances

Artistic taste today is likely to dismiss Painter John Singer Sargent as briskly as it does that whole great clutter of heavy gilt frames, dusty plush draperies and ornate grandeurs that marked his vanished era. It is only 30 years since Sargent died, half a century since the Edwardian peak of his fame; yet the interval can hardly be measured by years alone. Just how far and fast fashions have changed since Sargent's day could best be seen this week at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, celebrating the centennial of the painter's birth with an exhibition of 100 Sargent pictures.

"Astonishing Picture." Sargent was born rich, the son of a Philadelphia expatriate in Europe, into a wondrously complacent world where no gentleman ever had to make his own bed. Traipsing from capital to capital with his parents and sisters, he grew into a sophisticated young man with a high collar beneath his full beard. He developed only one passion: painting, of the sort practiced long before by Frans Hals and Velasquez.

Sargent learned the lessons of his chosen masters brilliantly and soon. It was in Paris, at a scant 27, that he proved himself a painter of felicity and not just flair. His Daughters of Edward D. Bolt (opposite) found a place at the Salon of 1883, and in the minds of men. One critic dis missed it instantly as "four corners and a void." Novelist Henry James was more discerning: "The naturalness of the composition," he wrote, "the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets and of instinct and knowledge playing together--all this makes the picture . . . astonishing."

Both in style and in mood the picture echoes Velasquez' huge masterpiece, The Maids of Honor, at the Prado. But where Velasquez firmly persuades the eye to believe in the painted image, Sargent only beguiles it into a momentary suspension of disbelief. And Velasquez' reverent handling of the way light falls on objects becomes mere virtuosity in Sargent. The fortuitous manner in which Sargent's light picks his flowerlike figures out of the gloom smacks more of the theater than of life. Yet when all this has been said, it is true that no painter alive today--with the possible exception of Augustus John --could have carried off half so well what Sargent set out to do. He remains, as the Metropolitan Museum's onetime Director Francis Henry Taylor puts it, "one of the most brilliant virtuosos of the brush since the 18th century."

Paralyzing Paint. A year after his triumph with the Boit children, Sargent sent another painting to the Salon, which had a different sort of success. His subject was the reigning beauty of the hour, one Madame Gautreau (see cut). Sargent confided to a friend that Madame was "a uniform lavender or blotting-paper color all over," but justly added that she had "the most beautiful lines." He painted her with the accent on her low neckline and produced a succes de scandale.

Paris thought the picture immodest, and Madame herself was embarrassed.

(Sargent later sold the portrait to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum.) In the furor, few seemed to care that Sargent had combined bare flesh and black velvet, starkness and stylishness, in an unforgettable image.

Sargent resolved to put the English Channel between himself and his detractors. He took an ornate studio on London's Tite Street, later installed his wid owed mother and unmarried sister in a flat around the corner. To be "done by Sargent" became the posh thing; celebrities flocked to his studio. But instead of immortalizing, he rather paralyzed most of them, turning them into clotheshorses, handsome or beautiful as the case might be. having elegant gestures and bored, sleepy expressions.

Sargent seemed to be coasting on the crest of the wave; yet in a way, he was trapped by his own success. Francis Taylor, who once visited Sargent, remembers him as "a thoroughly tamed and domesticated animal, who lived only for his painting and for no other purpose."

With age the animal grew fat, and kicked. "Portrait painting," he would burst out, "is a pimp's profession." He amused himself increasingly with watercolor landscapes, to which he gave a wet, soft and unconvincing glisten. .During World War I, Sargent sketched and painted at the front--an act of courage and enterprise which nevertheless achieved little. He had visited the U.S. on occasion, and never relinquished his U.S. citizenship. Toward the end he accepted a corn-mission to design murals for the rotunda and entrance hall of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which he hoped would be his great work.

Down from the Attic. Soon begrimed, and lighted only by 100-watt bulbs, Sargent's murals have long escaped the attention of most Boston Museum visitors.

For the opening of this week's show they were cleaned and given fluorescent lighting, which would have pleased the portly old gentleman's heart. Doubtless he would have been less pleased to see his exhibition tricked out with an array of turn-of-the-century props. Museum Director Perry Rathbone had raided Boston attics for polar bear pelts, potted palms and king-size bric-a-brac to give the show a period flavor.

Apparently, Rathbone felt that the time to decide whether Sargent was more than a maker of period pieces has not yet arrived. "While his star appears to be rising again," Rathbone wrote in the exhibition catalogue, "critical opinion is not yet willing ... to admit that he is the artistic peer of his now more securely established American contemporaries--Homer, Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Ryder and Whistler."

In an eloquent passage, Sargent's friend Edmund Gosse gives one possible reason. Sargent, says Gosse, "thought that the artist ought to know nothing whatever about the nature of the object before him . . . but should concentrate all his powers on a representation of its appearance. The picture was to be a consistent vision, a reproduction of the area filled by the eye. Hence, in a very curious way, the aspect of a substance became much more real to him than the substance itself."

In short, Sargent was a painter of appearances. Nothing could be more foreign to the modern, analytical temper, which is always denying that appearances count for much.

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