GLR March-April 2023

ESSAY

The Inscrutable John Singer Sargent A NDREW H OLLERAN

“Y OU KNOW, I’m terrified of your brother,” a guest confessed at the dinner that John Singer Sargent’s sister Emily, who lived just a few blocks from him in London, gave on what turned out to be the last night of her brother’s life. And why not? There had always been something formidable about Sargent, something that discour aged questions, certainly about his personal life. He was, in the estimation of Paul Fisher, his latest biographer, “a shy and pri vate man.” And then there were his accomplishments. On the night of that dinner, Sargent was the famous portrait painter of the great and good of Anglo-American society: people like Teddy Roo sevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the Duke of Marlborough, George V, John D. Rockefeller, and innumerable socialites. He had been given five honorary degrees, sixteen exhibition prizes, a Légion d’honneur, and membership in the Royal Academy, and he was chairman of the British School in Rome. He was an autodidact, fluent in Italian and French—the book beside his bed the night he

way was so impressive at an early age that his parents decided to nurture it, culminating in their move to Paris so that Sargent could study with one of the established painters who took stu dents—in his case, Carolus-Duran, who admitted him on the spot after seeing his work. Even Sargent’s classmates recog nized his superior gifts, and his first submission to the Paris Salon, a portrait of his teacher, was a hit. Sargent is still thought of as a portrait painter today—he made so many—though his favorite medium was watercolors. Watercolors seem to have been done for his own pleasure, oil paintings to make a living. About portraits Sargent was de flating. “A portrait,” he used to say, “is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth.” But it was a genre at which he excelled. Being chosen for the annual Paris Salon was not enough; he wanted his portraits of women in society to create a buzz—which they did, until he went too far with his portrait of Amélie Gautreau, the New Or leans-born wife of a French merchant banker. The painting called Madame X so scandalized Paris—in part because Sar gent had depicted one of the straps on her black dress slipping gent thrived. When people would knock on his door asking for work, Sargent, if interested, would invite them in and ask them to remove their clothes “so I can see your figure.” One of these was Nicola D’Inverno, an amateur boxer who became not only Sargent’s model but his studio manager and valet for 25 years, until D’Inverno got into a fight with the bartender at the Hotel Vendome in Boston and Sargent had to let him go. Long before that, however, Sargent’s studio on Tite Street became the lodestar of fashionable London. For his own pleasure, he joined fellow painters who gathered to paint outdoors in a village called Broadway in the Cotswolds. At the height of his career, Sargent was so much in demand that he was able to charge for one portrait what it would take to purchase a house. However, toward the end he became ex tremely tired of doing them. “Paw-traits,” he called them, mock ing the accent of the people he painted. One of the things he hated about the sessions was the fact that the artist was expected to make small talk with his sitter while he painted. To relieve the strain of capturing his subject he would withdraw behind a cur tain during breaks and stick his tongue out at his sitter. Even the down her shoulder—that when putting the strap back did not solve the problem, he moved to London, on Henry James’ advice, to start all over again. In London, he took over a studio on Tite Street that had once been used by Whistler. Across the street was Oscar Wilde, whose article on London models—“a class of peo ple whose sole profession is to stand and pose”—depicted the milieu in which Sar

died in his sleep in 1925 was Voltaire’s Dic tionnaire philosophique —and, in Fisher’s phrase, “a card-carrying workaholic.” He was physically impressive too—tall, bearded (which hid a recessive chin), with large blue eyes that were slightly protuberant. Two of his self-portraits show a face one could justifiably call haughty. In the later por trait, he looks like a British aristocrat, which is evidently how Sargent wanted to present

We are left with three possibilities: Sargent was asexual or, like Henry James, married to his work, or so clever that he had sex with men that left no trace.

himself to the world: as one of the people he painted. The blurred photograph on the cover of Paul Fisher’s new biography, on the other hand, shows a different man: round-faced, with slightly bulging eyes and the air of someone who might lose his temper at any moment, almost a figure from Fawlty Towers . Quite hand some when young, in later life, even in formal dinner dress, he was said to look “like a sailor gone wrong.” In fact, Sargent had in almost all respects gone right. The son of American parents who went to Europe on a visit and never came back, Sargent had the sort of childhood that makes Henry James’s peripatetic upbringing look stable. The Sargents were rich, but not rich enough to stay wherever they wanted. Instead, after losing two children in infancy, they traveled to places that they thought would be salubrious for their surviving offspring (John and two sisters). In winter the family went to the south of France, in summer to the Alps, where Sargent formed a lifelong love affair with mountaineering while hiking with his father. His talent for sketching what he saw along the

Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand .

March–April 2023

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