JOHN SINGER SARGENT Documentary

Welcome to the future, PBS Digital. By 1900, John Singer Sargent was the most admired, the most sought after portraitist in the Western world. He exquisitely portrayed in oil and watercolor the elegance of the Gilded Age, the last days of Queen Victoria, a time of extravagant clothing and extravagant tastes. Yet after his death, his work was quickly dismissed as superficial and passé. Now, a reexamination of not only his portraits, but his numerous landscapes, figure paintings and murals, reveals Sargent to be one of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an artist consistently pushed outside the framework of acceptability to capture the essence of his times and the carnage of the First World War that brought his era to its bloody end. John Singer Sargent, outside the frame, is made possible by a generous grant from the Eugene B. Casey Foundation. The Gilded Age, it is the time of George Bernard Shaw, of Claude Monet, of Oscar Wilde. The height of aristocracy in Edwardian society. Few suspect that beneath that beautiful veneer, lie the seeds of revolution and world war. John Singer Sargent captured both the beauty and complexity of this time by standing apart from it. In Paris, he was the expatriate American. In London, the radical French painter. In America, the sophisticated European. He spoke many languages. He moved very freely through all sorts of society. But he wasn't out, so he never fully belonged. That's not easy, but it has an artistic benefit because it does give you a certain objectivity, a certain distance. You stand outside of traditions, of conventions that can be inhibiting for artists who have to work within them. It's very much a part of his angle of vision, of his artistic point of view. His friend, Vernon Lee, wrote, Sargent's life was absorbed in his painting. And the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be he painted. John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, 1856. His parents had left Philadelphia, where his father was a surgeon. They came for a trip to Europe and never went home. They used to spend winters down in Rome, Nice, Florence, and then migrate north to Pau, Switzerland, Dresden. It was a fairly rootless existence. For companionship, John relied on his sister, Emily, just one year his junior. A second sister, Violet, was born when John was 14. The children grew up among the wonders of Europe, becoming fluent in English, French, Italian, and German. Dr. Sargent was responsible for their education and religious training. But it was Mary Sargent, herself an artist, who took them to every museum, palace, and garden she could. Not a day went by that John, spurred on by his mother, didn't complete a sketch. She wrote, John appreciates the beauties of nature and art, which are lavishly displayed in these old lands. He sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye. Sargent, from about the age of 10, is determined to be an artist. And he studies in various art schools, Florence, Dresden, Berlin. And so then this father concedes, and all right, if he's going to have the best education, where's the place you go to? Paris, 1874. The streets are filled with rubble left from the Franco-Prussian War. The word impressionism is coined. Monet, Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir are ridiculed in the city press. Sargent is 18 and studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. I'm in the midst of my exam and very busy. It seems unreasonably long, difficult, and terrible. The supreme moment is one of 12 hours, wherein we must make a finished drawing of the human form divine. The next order of business was to join a studio associated with a master artist. Sargent chose carefully. Emile Kairoulas-Duran was known for harsh criticism and rare praise. Recognizing talent, he accepted Sargent on the spot with this admonition. You have studied much, but much that you have learned, you must forget. The training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century was very thorough, very intensive, very time-consuming. The best in the world attracted people from all over the world, but it was highly disciplined, put a great deal of stress on drawing, drawing from casts, from the antique, as it was called, and only then working up then through the live model to painting. Kairoulas-Duran, in a sense, turned that on its head and got people painting right away. They learned, not the laborious sort of academic craftsmanship, but how to paint what they saw in terms of tonal values. Kairoulas-Duran used to say, search for the half tone, the half tone. Each stroke of the brush had to give you a tone and it was through the modeling of tone, through how you approach light and dark, that his pupils learned to translate what they saw into terms of decisive single brushstrokes. Sargent seems to have absorbed, with extraordinary facility, this ability to, in a series of brushstrokes, to conjure up form and to model form. Paris was the center of artistic innovation. Sargent navigated his way through impressionism, naturalism, and realism, charting his own course. He made sure his work was acceptable to those who could make or break a career, but he stretched the limits of convention wherever possible, challenging both himself and the viewer. Combining traditional methods with a new emphasis on spontaneity, he painted Oyster Gatherers of Cancale in 1878. The painting became Sargent's first major success at the career-making Paris Salon. He was only 22 years old, an American, and a student for only four years, yet he had achieved the official Salon recognition that contemporaries like Van Gogh and Cézanne never enjoyed. Sargent continued to stretch his artistic muscles. He experimented with impressionism, creating a Degas-like portrait of a Paris orchestra rehearsal. He continued to travel each year, across the continent as in childhood, but now with a purpose. Certainly after he enters Carlo Sturgeon's studio, his traveling becomes more focused because it's combined with his training on the threshold of an artistic career. He now becomes something of a careerist in his travel. He's no longer really an amateur. He never does a full-scale view of the Piazza San Margo or the Duomo. Instead, he seeks out elements of the Venetian environment which are pictorially arresting, filled with deep, even profound elements of Venetian life. It was the exotic, far-fetched quality which always attracted John Sargent. The words strange, weird, fantastic were on his lips. That word curious was his dominant word for many years. Vernon Lee. He traveled to Tangier, where he was struck by the unsparing light of North Africa and found exotic, mysterious subjects. Novelist Henry James, upon seeing the painting, I know not who this stately Mohammedan may be, nor in what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged, but in her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes, she is beautiful and memorable. The picture is exquisite, a radiant effect of white upon white, of similar but discriminated tones. Henry James. It boosted Sargent's meteoric rise, receiving rave reviews at the Paris Salon of 1880. The story goes, of course, that by the end of his four years, he had not only met Carolus' criteria, but probably surpassed them. And the wonderful demonstration of this is his portrait of his teacher in 1879, which was both a kind of valediction to his four years of training and, I think, a statement of competition for the future, because he not only learned Carolus Duran's lessons, but goes on, in fact, to outstrip Carolus. Spanish music was being performed in concerts at the Parisian concert halls, the Opéra Comédie, and probably given a fashionable gloss when performed in Paris. So that would have introduced Sargent to a kind of landscape of Spanish cultural possibilities. Carolus Duran had urged his students to study the Spanish masters. In 1879, while on a visit to Spain, Sargent was struck by the realism of Velázquez and Goya and began work on a very large canvas. El Jaleo translates as ruckus or uproar. Using it as a title, Sargent drew attention to the sound that emanates from his masterwork, the stamping heels of the dancer, and the cries of encouragement from the unseen audience. There's a kind of haunting, even tragic quality to the kind of fury and impassioned emotion of an accomplished gypsy flamenco dancer in the flesh. The light falls exclusively on her, her satin skirt and long train, the dark shawl that she flings around her, and he carefully drags his brush to articulate the tendrils of the fringes as they fill the air around her whirling figure. The way in which he painted El Jaleo clearly positioned him within the more liberal and avant-garde end of artistic accomplishment at the time in Paris. El Jaleo is the picture of the year, 1882. He's seen as a superstar, and that, again, is unusual for a foreigner, because the French are rather chauvinistic. With the success of El Jaleo came a growing demand for portraits. Now the young artist had to consider his client's desires, in addition to his own vision, a balance he found difficult to maintain. His daring composition of the Daughters of Edward D'Arleboit confused critics, one of whom referred to it as four corners and a void. However, Henry James, who would become a close friend, understood. The treatment is eminently unconventional, and there is none of the usual symmetrical balancing of the figures in the foreground. The light, the free security of the execution, the sense it gives us of assimilated secrets and instinct and knowledge of playing together, all this makes the picture an astonishing work on the part of a young man of 26. When was a pinafore painted with that power and made so poetic? Costume was as important to Sargent as composition. He dressed the diabolically handsome Dr. Pottsy in a deep red robe and posed him in a theatrical setting, possibly a bedroom, reflecting his client's reputation for vanity and romantic escapades. Pottsy's many lovers are said to have included actress Sarah Bernhardt and the tantalizing Madame Gautreau. She was a native of Louisiana, brought to Paris by her mother when her father died in the Civil War. Her odd beauty and natural grace attracted attention. She married well. And as Madame Gautreau, she became a celebrity in Parisian society and the constant subject of rumor and speculation. While visiting her family home in Brittany, Sargent sketched her in preparation for a much larger painting, one that would change the course of his life. He wrote to Vernon Lee, In a few days I shall be tackling the portrait of a great beauty. She has the most beautiful lines. He sought her out, wanted to paint her, got mutual friends to arrange an introduction. He worked very hard on developing that picture. There are a number of oil sketches, drawings in which he looked at her from different angles and different settings, doing different things. He saw her as a representative of modern times. The end result is an extraordinary distillation. It's so simple, it's just Madame X. It was his seventh consecutive year showing at the Salon. Ironically, in an exhibition full of female nudes, the clothed Madame X caused a scandal. Sargent's friend Ralph Curtis reported, Yesterday, the funeral of John Sargent. He was very nervous, but his fears were far exceeded by the facts. Madame Gautreau and her mother made a fearful scene. I fear he has never had such a blow. Most shocking was the strap which originally fell seductively from the subject's right shoulder until repainted back in place by a chastened Sargent. It bombs partly because it is so extreme in its statement, the outturned arm, the black, sheath-like dress. This was an insolent woman insolently displaying her beauty in a highly erotic way and it was an insolent work of art. Sargent had overplayed his hand. What conditions there were, dried up. The call of friend and anglophile Henry James lured him to England and a fresh start. Young John Sargent has high talent, a charming nature, artistic and personal and is civilized to his fingertips. I take a great interest in him and am very desirous to witness his future. Henry James. There is perhaps more chance for me in London as a portrait painter although it might be a long struggle for my painting to be accepted. It is not beastly French. It was the 1880s. The first skyscraper, ten stories high, was completed in Chicago. An underground train system opened in London and Kaiser Wilhelm II ascended the German throne anxious to challenge the power of the vast British Empire. In England, Sargent joined the artists and writers who gathered in the village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. He began again to explore the theories of Impressionism. Sir Edmund Gosse, a Broadway regular, remembered Sargent's work in the fields. He was accustomed to emerge carrying a large easel to advance a little way into the open and then suddenly to plant himself down nowhere in particular behind a barn opposite a wall in the middle of a field. The process was like that in the game of musical chairs where the player has to stop dead wherever he may happen to be directly the piano stops playing. His object was to acquire the habit of reproducing precisely whatever met his vision. In those days, this was a revolutionary doctrine. You see the wonderful picture of the Ellu painting, Paul Ellu with the bony knees and his wife looking thoroughly bored. The background is swept in with these great weeds but he's absolutely got Ellu. Sargent continued to visit colleagues in France once capturing his old friend Claude Monet at work in the woods near Giverny. Music Indoors, Sargent was no less daring continuing to push beyond the traditional rules of composition. Upon his commission to paint the Vickers family he wrote to Vernon Lee I am to paint several portraits in the country and three ugly young women at Sheffield. His portrait of the Mrs. Vickers with its unbalanced use of space and the very unusual downcast eyes of its central figure received good reviews in France but was thoroughly panned by the English Royal Academy. The Paul Moll Gazette voted it the worst picture of 1886. Determined to win out over what he perceived to be English prejudice Sargent jumped at the opportunity to paint author Robert Louis Stevenson whom he called the most intense creature he had ever met. Stevenson described Sargent as a charming, simple clever, honest young man. He wrote to friends Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining room in my own velveteen jacket and twisting as I go my own moustache. It is, I think, excellent but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner my wife in this wild dress and looking like a ghost is at the extreme other end. All this is touched in lovely with that witty touch of Sargent's but of course it looks damn queer as a whole. Robert Louis Stevenson Never confined to portraits alone Sargent continued working on outdoor figure paintings. A specific event at Broadway had caught his eye. I'm trying to paint a charming thing I saw the other evening. Two little girls in a garden at twilight lighting paper lanterns among the flowers from rose tree to rose tree. I have two good little models I shall be a long time about it if I don't give up in despair. The progress of the picture was a matter of excited interest to the whole of our little artist colony. At the exact moment which of course came a minute or two earlier each evening the painter was accompanied to the scene of his labours. At a certain notation of the light he ran forward planting rapid dabs of paint and then retiring again only with equal suddenness to repeat the wagtail action. All this occupied but two or three minutes the light rapidly declining and then Sargent would join us again in a last turn at lawn tennis. Edmund Goss Capturing this twilight moment occupied many months. Sargent pushed on past the summer growing season. Now my garden is a morass my rose trees, black weeds with flowers tied on from a friend's hat and ulsters protruding from under my children's white pinafores. I wish I could do it with the right lighting in the right season it is a most extraordinary sight. Music Carnation Lily, Lily Rose was a popular success at the Royal Academy in 1887 but some English critics were still not ready to embrace Sargent. His work had a sense of immediacy that smacked too much of French impressionism for conservative English taste. However, when Sargent made his first professional visit to the United States that same year his reputation as a European artist made him an instant success. Sargent came to America first of all to Boston and he was really mobbed. Everybody wanted to be painted by him. He had quite powerful backing from people like McKim, Mead and White who were prominent architects and of course Sargent portraits looked terrific in the context of those sort of houses. He was a returning prodigy but he represented European high style. In London neutral friend Henry James had introduced Sargent to Isabella Stuart Gardner a leader in Boston society she, like Sargent was well travelled, well educated and sophisticated. She represented for Sargent a figure of accomplishment and he represented for her an artist of accomplishment and also a cultural personality of American extraction who epitomized the kind of taste and breadth of cultural awareness that she herself acquired in her lifetime. She commissions a full length portrait from him. In keeping with his and Mrs. Gardner's penchant for the exotic Sargent placed his friend in front of a 16th century Italian brocade, letting it form a halo around her. Henry James referred to the work as a Byzantine Madonna. Mr. Gardner was less pleased. He's reported to have said to his wife it looks like hell but it looks like you. It shows off her figure possibly a little bit too conspicuously. Her husband decreed that the portrait would never be shown publicly again during his lifetime and his wife apparently agreed with him and honored his wishes and it wasn't. Their friendship survived into old age bringing the opportunity for another very different kind of portrait. At the end of her life in 1922 during one of these visits where he's allowed still to come and have tea with her and just chit chat for a while and so on. She's not bedridden but she spends most of her time on a kind of sofa and not too many people see her and he asked to paint her and she consents. She makes an exception because she's obviously not in a situation where one would want a likeness to be taken and he does it as a watercolor. She's swaddled in what apparently was a white blanket but he makes it look like a Moroccan robe and he endows her with the spirit of a kind of wise, even prophetic dignified mature personality which is of course exactly what she was. From 1887 on Sargent would periodically travel throughout America painting usually on commission the nation's most prominent men and women including Boston philanthropist Henry Lee Higginson and Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect responsible for New York's Central Park. Posing in the gardens he designed for the Vanderbilt Mansion. During an extended stay in Florida Sargent agreed to paint patriarch John D. Rockefeller Here I am in temperature like a Turkish bath about to begin work on the old gentleman who looks like a medieval saint. Sargent's immense popularity and his friendship with influential architects Charles McKim and Stanford White brought a new challenge the opportunity to create murals for two of Boston's most prominent buildings. He considered such an offer one of the highest honors an artist could receive but he could not foresee the controversy it would cause. For the Boston Public Library Sargent chose to illustrate the progress of religion. He traveled extensively through Egypt, Greece and the Middle East to gain inspiration for symbolizing early pagan beliefs. His first murals were well received but his two symbols of Christian and Judaic traditions caused a scandal. Sargent personified synagogue as a tragic figure blindfolded and shrouded in the veil of the temple. Church on the other hand was portrayed as powerful, triumphant and distant. He intended to unify the images with a central panel of Christ preaching. Early viewers of synagogue however were quick to denounce Sargent as anti-Semitic. Surprised he denied the charge and tried to explain his choice of imagery. Ultimately he retreated from the controversy and the project. The central panel remains blank. While working on the library project Sargent had accepted the additional task of creating murals for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The museum's murals are really a wonderful decorative ensemble populated with figures from classical mythology and there are a lot of individual stories told in the different pictures but in total what they talk about are the sanctity of the arts particularly the visual arts and the museum's role as the guardian of culture so it's really a celebration of the museum, its contents and its mission. The trustees originally suggested that Sargent decorate three little lunettes and he said well I have bigger ideas and proposed that they cover over the entire dome to make spaces for his paintings and sculpture. They agreed. When the murals were unveiled here the press went crazy people flocked to see them they were a tremendous success. It's a classical building and so it was inevitable that he chose to illustrate a number of scenes from classical mythology so in some of the murals you see stories such as Hercules in the Hydra or Perseus cutting off Medusa's head stories of that sort. These are giant paintings some of them were done in Boston, some of them were done in London so they were transported from Sargent's studio, unrolled here and held in place with giant wooden supports until the glue was able to dry. I don't think it makes sense to look at each individual painting and try to assess it as a specific work of art, that's not how Sargent meant you to see them, he meant you to see them as a totality, a great decorative ensemble and viewed that way they're spectacular. Sargent worked on the Boston murals over a period of 30 years all the while pursuing his career painting portraits, landscapes and figures the enormous success of his initial visit to America in 1887 made him all the more popular upon returning to London. Clients like Elsie Palmer a resident of England but also daughter of the man who founded Colorado Springs, helped Sargent bring his American success home to England. He asked to paint the celebrated English actress Ellen Terry. Terry has just come out as Lady Macbeth and looks magnificent, but she has not yet made up her mind to let me paint her in one of the dresses until she is quite convinced she is a success. From a pictorial point of view there can be no doubt about it magenta hair. In 1893 Sargent's portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnor was shown at the Royal Academy was hailed by the Times as the finest example of portraiture that has been seen here for a long time. While Mr Sargent has abandoned none of his subtlety he has abandoned his mannerisms and has been content to make a beautiful picture of a charming subject. He had come a long way since the dismissal of the Mrs Vickers as the worst picture of 1886. It's a more flamboyant age. His pictures I think are just so stylish and so alive and so brilliantly painted. Unlike other pictures with their rather flat backgrounds, rather stylised kind of images, rather working in sort of dull browns and all of that, here's Sargent taking it all apart. His career took off. He was inundated with an international demand for his portraits, painting 20 in 10 months alone. People describe him in the studio. He wore out the carpet going back and forth from the easel looking at the person then back and then forth, standing away and then rushing in shouting demons, demons and sort of suppressed. So you have to think of him as I think of a sort of kettle constantly on the boil. Henry James wrote to fellow author Edith Wharton, I am to sit tomorrow to Sargent for the third time. I have an impression that he may make a fresh start. If he does, he will probably over the known, the learnt ground go much straighter, but he may pick himself, or me, up and dash along as it is. Gretchen Fisk Warren of Boston was an intellectual who had declined professorships at Wellesley and Radcliffe and was not afraid to argue with Sargent about how she would be portrayed. She wanted to be seen in sombre green velvet that befitted her temperament. Sargent insisted on a more feminine gown. The artist won, dressing his client in a gown borrowed at the last moment from her sister-in-law. He asked to paint Thomas Lister the fourth Baron Ribblesdale, the epitome of the Edwardian aristocrat. Sargent portrays him in his buff, hunting outfit with a riding crop and Chesterfield overcoat. Of the painting, Lord Ribblesdale, author of Stag-Hunting Recollections, said, It has forced a greatness upon me, which is quite embarrassing. He was criticized for just painting costume, but he did paint costume. He did paint dresses, he did paint suits. He chose them because he realized that the clothes were part of the meaning. Manet, Whistler, Degas, they were all very keenly concerned with costume and there is nothing more current, more timely, more time-bound, nothing that speaks of a particular moment as clearly as fashion. It was a new century. Peter Pan soared for the first time over London, and the Wright brothers flew over the dunes of Kitty Hawk. In Japan, the Russian fleet was destroyed, laying the seeds for revolution. Change was in the air. Sargent was internationally acclaimed as the portraitist of the time, but in 1903, he began to shift away from portraiture, allowing a public exhibition of his landscapes and figure paintings. In 1907, a year after his mother's death, Sargent completed a rare self-portrait, saying, I have long been sick and tired of portrait painting, and when I was painting my own mug, I firmly decided to devote myself to other branches of art. He shocked the art world, announcing, No more portraits. I abhor and abjure them, and hope never to do another, especially of the upper classes. Above all, I must get abroad to see the sunlight and everything that is to be seen. The power of selection will follow. Venice, as always, was a welcome refuge, and Sargent captured its character in both oils and watercolors. Watercolors, of course, are very mobile, I mean, very easy to paint, because you don't have to set out the easel, and it's much simpler, and he just responds to the light and color and activity in Italy in a very spontaneous, free style. It's often a view from the gondola, and it's just a fragment, something that's caught its attention, but he's very often cropping pictures, as a photographer would do. His landscape's so radically different in style and subject from his portraits confused the critics yet again. Many could not accept Sargent's drastic career change. Critic Roger Fry led the attack, saying, Frankly, we like Mr. Sargent better on parade at the Academy, for here we see, alas, that Mr. Sargent, when he goes to Venice, reacts to the new surroundings for all the world like an ordinary tourist. A more sympathetic critic wrote, Why the most fashionable portrait painter of the time should give up the work that brought him fame while still in the possession of health and eyesight is a subject that gossip would love to feed upon in any age. But gossip this once was thwarted. Gossip can do nothing with the silent Sargent. In a letter to a patron, Sargent did once confess, Very few writers give me credit for insides, so to speak. He was known for his shyness and kept his private life private. He never married and his personal life reveals no romantic liaisons, creating some conjecture. Well, there has been talk recently about Sargent's sexuality as possible homosexuality. Some people feel that there's simply not enough evidence for it to talk seriously about it. There are drawings by Sargent that have a distinct homoerotic character. Does it affect his art? I don't think if it's so that it's the key to Sargent's art that unlocks dimensions of it that we haven't seen before. Maybe Sargent's insistence on privacy, his secrecy, his protection of his private life has maybe explained by that. He felt very deeply that he was endowed with a special gift and that he felt a deep-seated responsibility to use that gift to its fullest. And this drove him through the relatively long career that he had. Sargent was an artistic nomad, constantly painting that which caught his eye. He travels religiously and habitually every summer to a number of the same spots that he had first visited as a young boy. And he generally takes with him a group of close friends. Often included were other artists such as Ambrosio, Raphael, with whom Sargent enjoyed comparing techniques. He took great delight in portraying the daily activities of his friends. Companion Jane de Glen wrote to her mother, Yesterday I spent all day posing in Turkish costume on the mossy banks of the brook. He has stacks of lovely oriental clothes and dresses anyone he could get in them. He's interested in views that are unique to him. The Swiss Alps, the Canadian Rockies, Boston, are all stops on his constantly evolving personal itinerary as he goes along. They endure what we would consider to be physical hardship in order to do it. They camp out in remote locations in mountain lodges and things of that kind. While in the Alps he captured the stark mountain sunlight on the white gowns of his favorite niece, Rosemarie Ormond, and her friend. In his painting, The Repose, Rosemarie appeared again, causing one critic to declare, Mr. Sargent, while pretending to be occupied with pose and distribution of drapery, has given us one of those delightful representations of femininity. Another niece, Rain Ormond, posed for all seven figures in the mysterious and soulful painting, Kashmir. Sargent and his friends continued their travels and their work, unaware that their world was coming to an end. On June the 28th, 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to Austria and Hungary, was assassinated in Bosnia. The precarious balance of European power collapsed. War was declared, and Sargent returned to England, apparently unconcerned by the hostilities, he proceeded to America to install his mural and to sketch the Rockies. It was raining and snowing, my tent flooded, mushrooms sprouting in my boots, porcupines taking shelter in my clothes, canned food, always fried in a black frying pan, getting on my nerves, and a fine waterfall, which was the attraction to the place, pounding and thundering all night. The war came home to Sargent, at last, in its final year. In March 1918, his niece, Rosemarie, was attending a concert at St. Gervais in Paris, when a German bomb struck. She and 70 others were killed. That June, Sargent accepted a commission from the British government to be an official war artist. I shall feel tempted to go out and have a look at it, but would I have the nerve to look, not to speak of painting? I've never seen anything the least horrible outside of my studio. He was totally unfamiliar with a military campaign. He once said to a general, I suppose there is no fighting on Sundays. But he did not hang back, and at 62 years old, chose to travel to the very center of the conflict, the Western Front. He lived in a dugout for a time. He went to the trenches and witnessed that kind of aspect of the war. He sought out a kind of grassroots, hands-on, and probably at times rather dangerous, direct experience of what it was like to be fighting. Sargent was placed in a field hospital while recovering from a bout of influenza. In a hospital tent were the accompaniment of groans of wounded and the choking and coughing of gassed men, which was a nightmare. It always seemed strange on opening one's eyes to see the level cots and dimly lit long tent looking so calm when one was dozing in pandemonium. His charge was to celebrate on canvas the union of British and American forces for a proposed war memorial. The project has set heavily on me, for the naked eye cannot catch it in the act, nor have I so far forged the Vulcan's net in which the act can be imprisoned and gaily looked upon. I have only seen three fine subjects with masses of soldiers, one a harrowing sight, a field full of gassed and blindfolded men. It was not the glory of war, nor its decorated officers, but rather the image of enlisted men blinded by mustard gas that inspired one of his greatest works. Sargent may have been innocent when he went into the war, but certainly he seems to have lost his innocence when it came to painting that picture. He chose to show us this row of soldiers, this frieze of figures. It's a classical frieze in which things have gone horribly wrong and these soldiers are stumbling blind towards what end. Is it towards healing? Is it salvation? I think it's a very spiritual picture. The guy ropes he's very dominant on the right there look tremendously like the guy ropes in Tintoretto's Crucifixion of the Crests Being Raised. Gassed is physically a huge picture, but it was very emphatically a public picture. When you stand close to the picture, you're in there with that jumble of figures in the foreground making the experience all the more intense, all the more intimate. Who else has ever expressed the tragedy of war as he has done in his group of gassed soldiers? Its horror conveyed without contortion or grimace. And war's tragedy assigned a subordinate and transitory place in the order of things by that peaceful landscape and the game of football in the middle distance. While for the emotions of the beholder it is terrible, like a chapter of Tolstoy, Vernon Lee. Sargent completed the work in his studio only months after the war ended. New winds are blowing, there's a new political climate. The lifestyle that went with the kind of glamorous Anglo-American society that Sargent, of course, immortalized in his portraits has been said to have been gone forever, and I think that's true. The science of those aristocratic families that Sargent painted were lost in the trenches in France. One can hardly exaggerate, I think, the fact that a certain kind of lifestyle, the Edwardian lifestyle, if you will, was annihilated with the advent of the First World War. By the end of his career, John Singer Sargent had become the most prolific American painter of the 19th century. He had painted over 800 portraits and over 1,800 landscapes and figure paintings. On April the 14th, 1925, John enjoyed an intimate dinner party hosted by his sister Emily. They celebrated the completion of his decades of work for the Museum of Fine Arts. The final murals had been rolled and packed that afternoon, ready to sail with their creator to Boston. A tired Sargent quipped, Now the American things are done, and so I suppose I may die when I like. He was found the next morning, his glasses pushed up on his forehead. A copy of Voltaire's Dictionary Philosophique opened beside him. He had died in his sleep. Although still loved by many, Sargent's work rapidly fell out of fashion in the new post-war world. The emergence of modernism and abstract painting quickly overshadowed his legacy. Within a few years of his death, he was no longer taken seriously, dismissed as a mere society painter. When I studied the history of art, when Sargent was at issue, he was held up as an example really of almost everything that was wrong. With art he was superficial, he was just concerned with fashion, he only painted pretty people and so on. What I think we now begin to see, over and over and over again, is that this simply isn't true. Or if he did, if he was concerned with dress, with costume, with fashion, that was a very deliberate and significant part of his art. We also, I think, begin to see that Sargent is not at all superficial. That his paintings are often charged with psychological meaning. The inscription on Sargent's tombstone in Latin reads, or, to work is to pray. It refers, obviously, to his industriousness, his indefatigability, his physical vigor. To work is to pray suggests, of course, that his industriousness was also a form of spirituality. For Sargent, painting and life were inseparable. From early youth with his mother's encouragement, he had worked every day of his life. He had reached the pinnacle of artistic success on both sides of the Atlantic. He had travelled the world. He had witnessed the glitter of high society and the deep horrors of the battlefield. And all of it he captured on canvas. More and more it has seemed to me that Sargent's life was absorbed in his painting. And the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think, be he painted. John Singer Sargent Outside the Frame is made possible by a generous grant from the Eugene B. Casey Foundation.