John Singer Sargent and the Art of Elegance

Oscar Wilde, who lived across the street from John Singer Sargent, once said that “all art is quite useless.”¹ Fifty years later, W. H. Auden said art (specifically, poetry) “makes nothing happen.”² These statements are true, in a sense: Art is not a device for accomplishing some larger task, but a statement—an evaluation of life and the world. An encounter with a successful artwork is a process of involvement—of realization and judgment—on the audience’s part, just as the act of creating it is a process of judgment and articulation by the artist.

That is what differentiates art from instruction or argument, which are meant to teach or persuade. Art shows us a world in the form of a proposed idealization, which viewers, readers, or listeners then evaluate in terms of their own values. The audience sees, hears, or feels the world the artist has created, and asks, “Is this the kind of world I want to live in, and why?”³ That does not, of course, mean that good art is always pleasant. On the contrary, some great art—Goya or Dostoyevsky, for example—presents us with a world of horrors and invites our judgment that that is not the world we would like to live in. But either way, art is an activity, not a tool.

But in another sense, Wilde and Auden were wrong. Art is not useless, but a most useful thing—even a psychological and spiritual necessity, as a projection and expression of our values. And far from making nothing happen, art’s power to convey and inspire is profoundly motivating. In fact, many, if not most, of mankind’s most significant accomplishments have been inspired, or at least accompanied, by great works of art.

The point is that our profoundest beliefs about life—our evaluation of such things as joy and pain, war and peace, success and suffering—influence our appreciation of art. To illustrate this, I want to examine my own favorite painter, John Singer Sargent. At one time America’s most celebrated portrait painter, Sargent spent his stellar career creating a world of spontaneity, glamour, and joy. Yet his reputation fell after his death, when intellectuals came to view these values as passé, even antisocial. Sargent, one critic claimed, was a mere illustrator, not an artist. Fortunately, interest in Sargent began to revive in the 1980s, when artists and critics began reevaluating his significance. Today, he again is considered among America’s finest painters. Yet the scope of his artistic virtues still is not fully appreciated.

Radical or Conservative?

Sargent was born in Italy in 1856 to an American couple who had gone to Europe for health reasons and decided to stay. And he largely remained in Europe, too; although classified as an American painter, he lived most of his life in Britain and France, visiting the United States only rarely. His mother, an amateur artist, encouraged his childhood interest in drawing; and by the time he was eighteen, he was skilled enough to be accepted as a student by the respected French portraitist Carolus-Duran. A rebel who eschewed the traditional training regimen whereby students first learned drawing and worked their way up to paint, Carolus-Duran insisted that students immediately begin with oil on canvas. He emphasized color and shading rather than forms and masses, and he taught students to use long, carefully planned brushstrokes—what critics called a “painterly” style, which would become Sargent’s signature.

While still a student, the twenty-one-year-old Sargent submitted a painting to the Paris Salon, where the nation’s foremost painters displayed their latest works each year for critical evaluation. His work was well received, and during the next three years, he traveled through Spain, Italy, and North Africa, painting street scenes and portraits that impressed connoisseurs. His rapid success was due partly to an astonishing work ethic; he eventually became one of the most prolific American artists of the century, producing about three thousand landscapes, watercolors, and portraits—including the official portraits of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—as well as impressive murals for the Boston Public Library and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.⁴ Few artists have attained such success during their lives as John Singer Sargent.

But fully appreciating his work today is difficult, partly because he refused to explain his art in words. He published no manifestos, almost never answered critics, and left few letters from which to derive any sort of apologia for his work. Grasping what makes him special, therefore—and why intellectuals came to reject his work for so long after his death in 1925—requires us to understand the aesthetic trends of his lifetime.

Another obstacle to a full comprehension of Sargent’s achievements is that he does not fit into the neat categories art historians often use. Such scholars typically divide the 19th century into two camps: the sophisticated, upper-crust salon and the rebellious, heroic avant-garde. This distinction reflects a genuine debate: The 19th-century salon really did represent formal, upper-class taste, and the rebels—especially those labeled “Impressionists”—created their own organization in reaction to it. These rebels eventually succeeded in overthrowing the accepted artistic standards of their day, giving birth to a new artistic era.

Yet Sargent’s place in that saga is unclear. One might be tempted to categorize him with the conservative salon, given his popularity among the wealthy, conservative patrons of his era. Yet he was friends with many Impressionists, especially Claude Monet, and his early work was indisputably Impressionistic and experimental.⁵ Many art experts therefore classify him as an Impressionist. Yet his style differed drastically from the Impressionists’; he fashioned a distinctive technique that scholars Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormand label “a form of bravura realism crossed with Impressionism, painting with an eye for the realities of light and color in powerful and succulent brushstrokes so that his sitters were presented as real people.”⁶

This “bravura realism” might be better termed romantic realism. Romanticism’s distinctive quality lies in its premise that man has free will—as opposed to being the puppet of forces beyond his control—and a successful artwork, which integrates content and style, articulates that principle in a way that is accessible to viewers, rather than being bewildering or incomprehensible. Yet Sargent’s Romanticism is more subdued than that of such unmistakably romantic artists as Caspar David Friedrich, who made metaphysical freedom the specific theme of his work.⁷ Nor did Sargent express himself in allegory or fantasy, as did many Romantics, including Friedrich and the pre-Raphaelites. With the exception of his murals (which are allegorical), Sargent’s work takes that freedom as a given, focusing instead on the irreplaceable beauty of particular moments in life. In both technique and theme, his art celebrates individuality and the beauty, gravity, and significance of sensual experiences.⁸

Like the avant-garde artists, he rejected the archaic techniques of old masters, and never adopted the “minute exactness” or fantasy painting of the pre-Raphaelites.⁹ He remained realistic in orientation, refusing to resort either to pure abstraction—that is, painting shapes or colors as opposed to representing real things, as his friend James McNeill Whistler sometimes did—or to documentary naturalism, as with Thomas Eakins. Instead, his art chose a third way, separate from the salon and avant-garde categories, one that emphasized the uniqueness of his subjects and, as one critic observes, “open[ed] novel possibilities for conveying a powerful sense of the sitter’s physical presence, no longer in the timeless realm of traditional portraiture but in the vividness of the here-and-now.”¹⁰

One way to observe this is by comparing three paintings from the same era: Sargent’s Helena Dunham (1892);¹¹ Eakins’s Portrait of Miss Amelia Van Buren (1891),¹² widely considered one of the finest specimens of “realism”; and Whistler’s Harmony in Brown: The Felt Hat (1891–1899), a characteristic avant-garde piece.¹³ Eakins’s painting is highly detailed; its tone is severe, no-nonsense, dry. Its precision is impressive, its atmosphere uninviting, its documentary quality almost overwhelming. Whistler’s painting, by contrast, is stark, vacuous—lit, as his paintings often are, with an abrupt quality, as if by a paparazzo’s flashbulb on a dark street. The lady appears weary and unreal, and the blurring of her hands is distracting. Here, the discomfiting abstract quality predominates.

Miss Helena Dunham by John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Amelia Van Buren by Thomas Eakins, and Harmony in Brown, Felt Hat by James McNeill Whistler

Sargent’s portrait, on the other hand, is lush, graceful, and vibrant, with a quality of hopeful potential energy, yet without tension or stress. The painting is not just a picture of a person but of a moment in time—a sort of mental snapshot of heightened experience, like a fond memory. This is an art of benevolence, relaxation, and grace.

The Era of Grandeur

Sargent’s unique approach was driven partly by the vast technological and social changes going on during his life, which spanned from 1856 to 1925. This period included the Civil War and World War I, and it witnessed the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Panama Canal, the advent of the electric light, the radio, the automobile, and the airplane. Photographs, telephones, and motion pictures transformed the way people thought about time, and new ideas—particularly relativity, evolution, psychology, and socialism—changed the way they thought about reality and society.

During the same period, the expansion of relatively free markets brought drastic social transformations: the creation of a middle class, with a rising standard of living, and a new enthusiasm for the possibilities of transforming nature. As with the Renaissance,¹⁴ these developments (which art historians came to call the “American Renaissance”) led both to new artistic styles and to a new clientele for artists. Whereas in past ages painters had served royalty and nobility, they were now sought after by businessmen and financiers, many of them self-made men. The art these people wanted was devoted not to supernatural subjects or didacticism, but to life in the here and now—an era that increasingly was viewed as a new age of possibility. Most of all, these clients wanted portraiture, and it is revealing that John Singer Sargent never painted royalty, and with the sole exception of his library murals, never painted religious figures or themes. “Emancipated from all religious ideas,” as one friend described him, Sargent instead tended to paint businessmen and produced an art of prosperity and secularism—an art of worldly happiness.¹⁵

These transformations coincided with one of the most important aesthetic phenomena of the modern age: Impressionism, which fashioned new techniques on which Sargent would rely for almost his entire career. Impressionists sought to articulate the fleeting experience of an instant—to capture the spontaneous—and they emphasized motion, gestures, moods, transient light, and shadows. Impressionism was devoted to “the uniqueness of the moment, which has never existed before and will never be repeated.”¹⁶ This is obvious in the painting that gave the style its name: Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872),¹⁷ a glimpse of the port of Le Havre at dawn. This painting seeks to evoke an overall effect—of benevolence, warmth, even magnanimity—instead of capturing precise detail. As critic Robert Hughes observed, Impression, Sunrise gives “the feeling that the life of the city and the village . . . and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden—a world of ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.”¹⁸

Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet

This was an inherently individualistic aesthetic approach, because it captured the experience of a particular viewer at a particular time. As an art of “individual singularity,” which was “bent on strictly personal experiences,” Impressionism was what the era called “bourgeois,” meaning that it appealed not to peasants, day laborers, or members of royal families, but to business owners, bankers, lawyers, and civic leaders—in short, members of the social class that capitalism (or freer markets) made possible—and it expressed not religious or political themes, but a sense of wholeness in material plenty.¹⁹ In fact, after Sargent’s death, movements such as Dada and Social Realism would denounce Impressionism for just these reasons, calling it “decadent” and insufficiently “social.”²⁰

Sargent’s Style

Another, more meritorious critique often leveled at Impressionism was that it veered too far toward abstraction—sometimes producing blotches of color that fall short of conveying an integrated idea.²¹ But whereas paintings such as Monet’s La Cathédrale de Rouen, harmonie blanche 1892–1893²² might legitimately be accused of this, Sargent’s work cannot be. His art was comprehensible, articulate, and rational; in short, he employed a disciplined version of Impressionism that aimed at capturing candid moments and at conveying the idealized, essentialized personalities of his subjects.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is one of Sargent’s earliest masterpieces, El Jaleo (1882).²³ The painting depicts a Spanish flamenco dancer performing to the music of guitars. The theme is the improvised, eerie, almost ecstatic experience of flamenco por derecho—something considered quite exotic at the time. The title refers to the spontaneous clapping and shouting that accompanies this improvised dancing style, and the painting’s “design-theme” is hands: the clapping of the men on the left and the right, the outstretched fingers of the woman on the far right, and the rapid strumming of the guitarists. Sargent even incorporated red handprints on the wall.²⁴

El Jaleo by John Singer Sargent

These background effects appear not in sharp outlines, but in a slightly blurred, out-of-focus manner typical of Impressionism. Up close, they can seem like haphazard brushstrokes, and as a result some of Sargent’s critics later nicknamed his style “the slashing school.” But in reality, they are exquisitely disciplined, precisely placed lines of paint that, viewed from the proper distance, heighten the reality of the scene. The blurred background conveys a sense of motion and vitality and draws one’s eyes toward the feature that is most distinctly in focus—the dancer’s left arm. This is the center of the painting (note how the guitars’ necks even point at it, as do the eyes of the figures on the right); and the tones of shadow on the arm are warm and precise, with a depth of detail that emphasizes the tense and mysterious poise of the dancer’s fingers. The result is alluring and spontaneous—as is flamenco music itself.

The painting’s radicalism can be appreciated by contrasting it with another work completed the same year and exhibited in the same salon: the gorgeous Evening Mood by William-Adolphe Bouguereau,²⁵ leader of the salon painters. Lovely as it is, there is nothing spontaneous or worldly about Evening Mood. It is so smooth as to evoke an otherworldly, even generic perfection. Sargent’s is vibrant and somehow more real, despite the fact that Evening Mood is painted with a level of detail that Sargent purposely shuns. El Jaleo demonstrates what Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother calls Sargent’s delight “in the challenge of capturing a fleeting moment of beauty.”²⁶

Evening Mood by William-Adolphe Bougureau

Around the time he completed El Jaleo, Sargent took to calling himself an Impressionist.²⁷ Yet if this is a kind of Impressionism, it is an unusual kind. For one thing, it is, like most of Sargent’s paintings, far darker than anything by such Impressionists as Monet or Camille Pissarro. El Jaleo is lit only by the footlights that cast drastic shadows on the back wall, and large sections are swathed in voluptuous, even spooky black. In its gloomy palette and vivid motion, El Jaleo seems closer to the realism of Eakins²⁸ or Winslow Homer²⁹ than to the Impressionism of Monet’s La Cabane des Douaniers à Pourville³⁰ or Pissarro’s Woman and Child at the Well,³¹ both of which also were painted in 1882. El Jaleo was so radical, in fact, that some critics called it “uncouth” and “defect[ive],”³² and a few years later, the New York Times labeled Sargent a “revolutionar[y].”³³ Yet it was displayed at the Paris Salon, where it proved a hit even with conservative viewers.

La Cabane des Douaniers a Pourville by Claude Monet and Woman and Child at the Well by Camille Pissarro

In short, El Jaleo signaled the arrival of Sargent’s unique third way between the classicism of the salon and the radicalism of the avant-garde. It was rooted in reality, not fantasy, but reality as experienced in terms of its essentials—laying aside trivial details and highlighting and evaluating the meaning of a moment of sensual experience.

The Shock of the New

El Jaleo’s success brought Sargent his first major portrait commissions. In the years that followed, he produced hundreds of them, in oil, charcoal, and watercolor. Unfortunately, today’s scholars often downplay the significance of Sargent’s portraits, as if he only did them to pay the bills. Some exhibits of his work even have ignored his portraits entirely. But portraiture is so central to Sargent’s oeuvre that a full appreciation must focus primarily on his work as a portraitist. It was what he did best, and it was precisely for the virtues he displayed as a portrait artist that critics condemned him after his death.

One of the most striking features of Sargent’s portraits is their unusual posing. In an attempt to “unfasten portraiture from the prevailing attitude of monumentality,” Sargent often rejected the formal, stilted, even boring positions other artists employed.³⁴ Compare, for example, his 1881 Édouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron³⁵ with a painting done the same year by his popular contemporary, Charles Joshua Chaplin. Chaplin’s portrait of his daughter³⁶ is a typical example of his style—competent but not striking or memorable. Sargent’s painting of the Pailleron children, by contrast, is intense almost to the degree of eeriness.³⁷ A year later, Sargent painted The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,³⁸ which positions its subjects in ways that almost make them into geometric shapes—emphasized by the tall Japanese vases and sharp planes of the rug, doorway, and screen—making the painting as much a reflection on the stages of girlhood as a depiction of actual people.

Édouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s radicalism, however, quickly reached a dangerous limit. By the time he finished these two paintings, he already was at work on what would become his most notorious painting: Portrait of Mme. Gautreau,³⁹ known today as Madame X, which he unveiled at the salon of 1884, causing a scandal that nearly ruined his career.

Madame X by John Singer Sargent

No photograph has ever done justice to this painting, in part because it is difficult to capture the weird pallor of Virginie Amélie Gautreau’s skin. Sargent had been captivated by it ever since he first met her about two years before, and he had sketched her repeatedly before finally obtaining permission to paint her in full. Amélie was then twenty-one, a Louisianan who had moved to Paris with her mother after her father died in the Civil War. Amélie became a socialite, dressing provocatively, having scandalous affairs, and covering herself with lavender powder that gave her skin an almost dead color. Equally shocking was the black gown in which Sargent depicted her; the deep plunge of its neckline and the way she leans slightly forward, appeared risqué, even indecent, especially given that Sargent painted the dress’s shoulder strap falling off Amélie’s right shoulder. (He later repainted it in place, but some photographs remain that show how it originally looked.)⁴⁰ One critic remarked, “One more struggle, and the lady will be free.”⁴¹

Critics were so startled by Madame X that they hunted for words to express their revulsion. It was “vulgar,”⁴² they said; “hideous,” “nauseating,” and “monstrous.”⁴³ What shocked them was not really the sexual suggestiveness—French art showed plenty of female nudes in 1884. Rather, it was the way Madame X portrayed a modern, self-confident, even arrogant and unapologetic socialite, and, consequently, something Europeans were ashamed to see celebrated. Amélie already was the subject of widespread gossip due to her infamous liaisons, and Sargent had even painted one of her lovers, Samuel Jean de Pozzi, just a few years before, in a style that evoked an almost Satanic image of decadence.⁴⁴

It’s easy today to regard the critics’ reaction as parochialism, but they had a point. The painting is less a portrait than a social commentary—one that emphasizes everything that made Amélie artificial and un-genuine: her makeup, her formal attire, her carefully planned, unnatural pose. As critic Elizabeth Prettejohn writes, Sargent used Amélie’s “individual appearance as the vehicle for his compelling presentation of the social type, ‘professional beauty.’”⁴⁵ This wasn’t exactly ridiculing her, but it also made no sincere attempt to know her or to introduce us to her. Today, Madame X stands as one of Sargent’s few attempts at editorializing, and to the degree that it does articulate a judgment, it is not only a negative one, but one that, more than a century later, appears to us as quaint, at best.⁴⁶

Yet Sargent once called Madame X “the best thing I have done,”⁴⁷ and when Amélie’s mother stormed into his studio, weeping and demanding that he withdraw it from the salon, he angrily refused. Unable to sell it after the salon ended, he kept it in his private collection, refusing to display it until, years later, he gave it to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it hangs today.

While Madame X remains one of Sargent’s most famous works, it certainly is not his best. For all of its technical brilliance, it is more a curiosity than a masterpiece; and long after the controversy has subsided, we can see that it lacks the personality and individuality that make Sargent’s other paintings so memorable.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Sargent had been planning a move to London even before finishing Madame X, but now, when he did move, it seemed like he was fleeing Paris in shame. Upon his arrival, in fact, he found that word already had reached the British and that clients were staying away. Unable to obtain commissions, he spent months painting landscapes and sketches of friends, instead, and even briefly considered abandoning art.⁴⁸ In the summer of 1885, while recovering from an injury he sustained while swimming, he found himself touched by a lovely scene of Japanese lanterns being hung in a flower garden at sunset.⁴⁹ He began sketching lanterns, along with the children of some of his friends. Eventually, he would combine these into one of his finest works, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, completed in October 1886.⁵⁰

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent

The painting took so long to finish because Sargent only painted it during a few minutes each evening, in order to capture the precise color tones of early twilight. This became something of an ordeal, according to one witness: “The easel, the canvas, the flowers, the demure little girls in their white dresses,” all had to be ready for

the exact moment, which of course came a minute or two earlier each evening. . . . Instantly he took up his place at a distance from the canvas, and at a certain notation of the light ran forward over the lawn . . . planting at the same time rapid dabs of paint on the picture, and then retiring again. . . . All this occupied but two or three minutes, the light rapidly declining, and then while he left the young ladies to remove his machinery, Sargent would join us again, so long as twilight permitted, in a last turn at lawn tennis.⁵¹

By the end of the season, Sargent even had to wire fake flowers onto the trees in order to complete the painting.

The finished work is a prime example of Sargent’s ability to capture the apparently spontaneous. Here, the theme is the transient delicacy of childhood. It depicts two children, framed by flowers that seem like the enchanted blossoms in Alice in Wonderland, lighting fragile paper lanterns with a concentrated tenderness that suggests the fleeting beauty of youth itself. The painting seems almost magical with its evanescent twilight color palette—which contrasts with the warmth of the reflected firelight on the girls’ faces and forefingers. A friend once said that Sargent’s “habitual good temper” manifested not only in a “zest for the bizarre, the original, or anything odd, funny, or ridiculous,” but also in a “keen enjoyment of a fine gesture. . . . Humor played over his whole conception of life, in Carlyle’s definition, ‘like sunlight on the deep sea.’”⁵² That is evident here. Yet this humor is balanced by an earnestness in its appreciation for the irreplaceable value of a particular moment.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was a smash hit with British viewers, and it fully restored his reputation. As commissions began to flow in, Sargent entered the golden age of his career. From that point until his quasi-retirement in 1909, he would work on portraits almost incessantly, on a regular daily schedule, producing hundreds. Of these, we will examine two kinds—those that aroused the greatest ire in his later detractors: paintings of beautiful women and of wealthy men.

Portraits of Glamour and Grace

“Women don’t ask [me] to make them beautiful,” Sargent said, “but you can feel them wanting [me] to do so all the time.”⁵³ And he obliged. Under his capable brush, ordinary people—for example, Gretchen Fiske Warren and her daughter Rachel—were transformed into idealized, yet easily recognizable figures.⁵⁴

Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter by John Singer Sargent

This was not mere flattery, a charge that has been levied by some modern critics who have accused Sargent of focusing too much on image and costume rather than trying to psychoanalyze his subjects. Yet the idea that portraiture should try to make a psychological, social, or political comment about the subject is a recent innovation, one that postdates Sargent’s own career. His contemporaries did not complain that Sargent lacked this skill, because it was not among their criteria for good portraiture.

Even if it had been, Sargent doubtless would have refused. Portraitists today often are considered clever for undermining their subjects—as, for example, Nelson Shanks was celebrated for painting President Bill Clinton with the shadow of a blue dress in the background,⁵⁵ or sculptress Maria Kirby-Smith for including a cockroach in the back pocket of her statue of Senator Strom Thurmond.⁵⁶ Sargent, however, indulged in no such crudity, and although he never expressed his views openly, his career shows that he did not consider himself a spokesman for a political perspective, as many artists do today. With the notable exception of Madame X (and, later, his World War I commissions), he never attempted social commentary. Instead, his portraits focused on the essential elements of physical appearances and placed them in an order that expresses a value judgment about the world the subject inhabited. Sargent did look beneath the surface—just in a manner untouched by the Freudian or Marxist theories that later critics embraced. Instead, he focused on the individual natures of his subjects and the world they lived in. Rather than flatter his subjects, Sargent idealized them—producing art that epitomized his subjects, rather than pandering to them or insulting them.

Take, for instance, Elsie Palmer (1890),⁵⁷ a portrait that certainly is not flattering. Palmer was a wealthy and shy girl, then eighteen, whose passionate boyfriend later ran away with her sister. Sargent paints her as an intense, candid, intelligent, perhaps lonely young woman, with a sense of profundity beneath her frank gaze. Her image carries us into a realm of youthful earnestness, a world without secrets—or toleration for lies. The painting contrasts remarkably with Sargent’s buoyant portrait of Palmer’s close friend Helena Dunham,⁵⁸ or with Elizabeth Chanler (1893),⁵⁹ in which we encounter still another personality: a solemn twenty-seven-year-old whose parents and sister died when she was young and who grew up early of necessity.

Elsie Palmer and Elizabeth Chanler by John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s portraits of women are notable for the extraordinary confidence, intelligence, and forthrightness of their subjects. Consider Betty Wertheimer (1908),⁶⁰ Carmencita (1890),⁶¹ Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1893)⁶² or Mrs. Charles Thursby (1898),⁶³ all painted during a period of vast changes in the social and cultural status of women in Europe and the United States. Writers and journalists—especially Henry James—used the phrase “New Woman” to refer to this new ideal of femininity: women who were educated, articulate, ambitious, intellectually and psychologically independent, and physically active. In public consciousness, the New Woman was most widely associated with the Gibson Girl—a character devised by the artist Charles Dana Gibson (a friend of Sargent’s)⁶⁴ and often depicted wearing unconstraining clothes, riding bicycles, hiking, or playing musical instruments. Whatever their influences on each other might have been, the similarities in Sargent’s and Gibson’s depictions of the New Woman are plain.⁶⁵

Betty Werthheimer, Carmencita, and Mrs. Hugh Hammersley by John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s most famous New Woman portrait is Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1897),⁶⁶ in which Edith Stokes stands with a brilliant and cheerful expression on her face as her husband glowers in the background. She wears a loose, roomy skirt and a comfortable blouse with a tightly cinched waist, an outfit instantly recognizable at the time as signaling a New Woman.⁶⁷ Edith was a famous model, having posed for Daniel Chester French’s sculpture The Republic—centerpiece of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—as well as several other portraits, which give us the chance to compare Sargent’s work with those of some contemporaries. In Fernand Paillet’s 1892 version,⁶⁸ for example, Edith is placid and ordinary, even indistinct. Ceilia Beaux’s 1898 portrait is better,⁶⁹ but its beauty is carefully staged and still. Sargent draws attention to Edith’s easy confidence, whereas Beaux portrays her with self-conscious formality, in a painting that lacks the vivacious pose, the modern costume, and the candid light of Sargent’s version.

Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes by John Singer Sargent and Edith Stokes by Celia Beaux

Ten years later, Sargent painted the accomplished violinist Lady Leonora Speyer.⁷⁰ An intimate of composers Edward Elgar and Richard Strauss (Strauss dedicated his opera Salome to her), Speyer later taught at Columbia University and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1927.⁷¹ Sargent depicts her with a combination of grace and confidence that does justice to her artistry as well as her femininity. It is astonishing to reflect that this was completed the same year as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon⁷²—a misogynistic depiction of a brothel that almost literally tears the female form apart and displays the severed pieces.⁷³ It is ironic that, today, Picasso is regarded as the more “modern” artist, when the reality is that between these two, his work is both more technically primitive and more aesthetically and philosophically reactionary. Picasso’s work repudiates what Sargent’s celebrates: individualism, personality, and modern womanhood.

Lady Leonora Speyer by John Singer Sargent and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso

Sargent’s paintings are not only more dignified than Picasso’s, but also more erotic. Working decades before the word “sexy” entered the language⁷⁴—at a time when the artistic expression of secular and delightful sensuality was still in its formative stages, and artists largely confined themselves to expressing it in mythological or religious idioms—Sargent stood on the cusp of a new way to appreciate physical beauty, one that would be neither demeaning to women, as in the works of Picasso, nor excessively reverential as with Bouguereau. Consider, for example, Mrs. George Swinton (1896),⁷⁵ which marks an interesting contrast with Madame X. Beautiful and frank, clad in lush white satin, she is a prime example of Sargent’s blend of realism and Impressionism. In her authoritative but unpretentious elegance, Swinton is a vision of sensual femininity.

Mrs. George Swinton John Singer Sargent

Sargent’s greatest portrait, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892),⁷⁶ demonstrates his unique abilities to the fullest. Sargent finished this portrait in only six sittings, with no preliminary sketches—he simply painted it directly on the canvas—and one can appreciate what he made of Lady Agnew by comparing the finished painting with her photograph.⁷⁷ The real Lady Agnew was seriously ill at the time, but Sargent transformed her exhaustion into a compelling combination of relaxation and intensity, as though she knew some fascinating secret. ⁷⁸ In his hands, she becomes a passionate and articulate personality—serious but not dour, with a hint of a smile on her lips; a woman of penetrating intelligence whose eyes seem to burrow into one’s mind but whose relaxed ease also speaks of grace and sophistication. The Chinese characters on the silk backdrop heighten the painting’s exoticism; the translucent sleeves of her gown and the flower in her lap (which serves as the “design theme”), suggest a serene and uncompromising femininity.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent and photo of Gertrude Vernon

Portraits of Capitalism

Nineteenth-century capitalism changed the art world by creating a new class of consumers and new subjects for art—specifically, the technological and industrial accomplishments of the age and the sense of possibility and flourishing that they made possible. Successful capitalists and entrepreneurs sought portraiture that would do for them what the painters of centuries past had done for royalty and the priesthood. American businessmen and their families were particularly eager for this. Sargent’s paintings of such figures as oil tycoon Henry Lee Higginson (1903),⁷⁹ the daughters of steel magnate Thomas Vickers (1884),⁸⁰ Lisa Colt Curtis (1898),⁸¹ heiress to the Colt firearms fortune, and of art dealer Asher Wertheimer and his family (1898–1908)⁸² all evoke an air of dignity, grace, and joy.

Henry Lee Higginson, The Misses Vickers, and Mrs. Ralph Curtis by John Singer Sargent

In recent decades, some critics have tried to reconcile Sargent with their own anticapitalist politics by finding some trace of subversiveness or satire in these paintings, but this is nonsense.⁸³ There is no artifice here: Sargent’s art is not ashamed of the sumptuous or luxuriant, nor is the confidence in the faces he paints either feigned or exaggerated. His portraits of John D. Rockefeller,⁸⁴ for example, are simple, even reserved—intimate and unashamedly human. These are not heroic portraits in the classic sense, but they celebrate a different, more sedate kind of heroism—one concerned not with military victory, political authority, or religious devotion, but with the secular and material accomplishments of the new commercial class. That, of course, would prove to be the very reason Sargent was later condemned.

Two portraits of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by John Singer Sargent

A prime example is Sargent’s 1917 portrait of businessman Charles Deering.⁸⁵ Although an oil painting, Sargent designed it to resemble a watercolor, a form prized for its ability to convey a sense of lightness and ease. Deering was chairman of International Harvester, a company that produced trucks, mechanized tractors, and other farming equipment. The firm was a true powerhouse; it made thirteen hundred harvesters each day and employed thirty thousand workers.⁸⁶ In a generation, International Harvester and companies like it transformed agriculture from backbreaking human and animal labor—as it had been since prehistoric times—to a mechanized process. During Deering’s tenure as chairman, the total amount of cropland harvested in the United States grew from just under 300 million acres to about 350 million. The total amount of wheat harvested grew from 599 million bushels to 843 million,⁸⁷ and the potato harvest increased by some 30 percent.⁸⁸ All of this happened while the nation’s farming population decreased.⁸⁹ International Harvester made Deering fantastically wealthy. Yet he made his fortune not by killing or enslaving anyone, but by the hard work of producing machines that helped feed the world. And he chose to have his portrait painted in the sunshine of his beloved Florida, sitting in a rattan chair beside some scattered palm fronds.

Charles Deering by John Singer Sargent

This was a type of heroism—and of art—that many people were ill-equipped to appreciate at the time. To them, such things as harvesting equipment appeared mundane, and art that celebrated it, trivial. The year this portrait was painted, the Dadaist radical Marcel Duchamp inscribed a urinal and submitted it to a New York art fair, explaining that “the only works of art America has given [us] are her plumbing and her bridges.”⁹⁰ The Deering portrait, however, reminds us that the technological marvels of bridges, plumbing, and harvesting equipment, are at least as worthy of artistic celebration as anything accomplished by the saints and warriors of old—more so, in fact, for they have enabled us to enjoy the sense of light-suffused relaxation and pleasure into which Sargent’s painting invites us.

Yet, although Sargent portrayed the captains of industry with dignity and ease, he also turned an admiring eye on laborers. His Italian paintings, such as Venetian Water Carriers (1882)⁹¹ and Venetian Glass Workers (1882),⁹² and his paintings of the marble quarries in Carrara (Bringing Down Marble (1911)⁹³ and Lizzatori II (1911),⁹⁴ convey a deep respect for manual toil and for the relationship between the worker and his task. In Venetian Glass Workers, the rods of glass—each a single brushstroke of white—seem as much the focus as do the people busy turning them into beads. The people and the rods blend together so that the viewer regards them as equals. The same is true of the Carrara paintings. In Bringing Down Marble, Sargent uses the ropes and the angle of the horizon to draw the viewer’s eye up toward the background from the quarrymen toward the object of their work—resulting in what one scholar calls “a stirring tribute to the physical effort and engineering skill required to harvest marble from the earth’s crust.”⁹⁵ The painting honors labor without sentimentalizing it.

Bringing Down Marble and Venetian Glass Workers by John Singer Sargent

The End of Sargent’s Age

Gassed by John Singer Sargent

Yet even as Sargent was painting Deering and the marble workers, the world was changing in drastic ways. The outbreak of World War I marked a horrifying new chapter in Western civilization and in Sargent’s career. Already at work on the murals for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—for which he would devise a wholly new artistic style, closer to the Art Deco that would dominate the following decade—Sargent was asked by the British government to become the official painter for the Anglo-American war effort. He traveled to the front lines, sketching and painting watercolors of soldiers and war scenes, as well as a massive portrait of a group of generals. Few of these works were memorable, and only one—a massive mural simply titled Gassed (1919)⁹⁶—merited critical attention.

Seven feet tall and twenty feet long, this overwhelming painting depicts a line of soldiers, blinded by mustard gas, being led to a first aid station. In the foreground are scores of wounded men, scattered like lost souls in hell. The sightless troopers stumble forward, holding each other and aided by a strong and compassionate nurse. These figures embody a nobility, each of them individuals while at the same time anonymous and uniform. As the eye catches telling details—a man lifting his leg because he’s been told there’s a step; another in the background vomiting—one feels a sense of awe toward them and a revulsion at the way war has reduced them to this state. Yet the painting does not evoke pity so much as dignity in the face of hardship. Just as Sargent’s quarry paintings honored laborers without either romanticizing them or condescending to them, so Gassed treats the soldiers as mortal men, but not as victims.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the psychological and social consequences of World War I. Stripped of its previous optimism, Western civilization in the next years became self-critical even to the point of nihilism, and many of its leading lights concluded that if capitalism and technology had led to such a deadly catastrophe, they should be abandoned.

This collapse of cultural confidence found expression in the rise of so-called Modern Art. Movements such as Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dada led many artists to abandon representation entirely and to prefer cleverness or outrage over grace and gentility. Other movements, such as Ruralism, Social Realism (or the different, but similar, Socialist Realism), and the WPA style, later would produce blocky and cartoony designs that emphasized muscularity over grace, collectivism over individualism, power over enjoyment, and permanence over the fleeting instant.⁹⁷ Some of this new art was interesting, occasionally even beautiful—but it marked a wholly different aesthetic than that which Sargent knew, and it had entirely different aspirations. In 1932, only seven years after Sargent’s death, Edsel Ford—son of the automobile magnate Henry—would commission a portrait by the communist Diego Rivera,⁹⁸ whose style drew on mural paintings that were considered authentically “proletarian.”⁹⁹ The portrait does not capture a living moment, let alone the personality or infinite value of a living person; it is a caricature that emphasizes industrial work and lacks anything hinting at history or warmth, let alone individuality.

The first hint of this transformation in aesthetics came in the 1910s, when critic Roger Fry, a member of England’s modernist Bloomsbury Circle, began denouncing Sargent’s work in magazine articles. Why he targeted Sargent specifically never was entirely clear,¹⁰⁰ but it had to do with Fry’s belief in what he called “Post-Impressionism.” This was a theory of aesthetics that focused on the viewer’s sense experience—on arrangements of shapes—rather than on concepts or the ideas that art inspires. “Pure art” was about “rhythm of the line,” Fry argued, “mass,” and “space,” not about experience, and it focuses on “the emotions resulting from the contemplation of form” rather than on depicting the world in light of an artist’s values.¹⁰¹

Fry called his approach “scientific,” but it would be more accurate to liken it to mathematics, because it centered on geometry within an immaterial, even Platonic realm of form that bore no relation to the lives of artists and audiences.¹⁰² Sargent’s resolute focus on the latter struck Fry as obsolete. Sargent “never muddles or messes a tone,” he complained. “Every brush stroke goes pat into its place, every tone is true enough as representation of the visible facts.”¹⁰³ He had “the undifferentiated eye of the ordinary man trained to its finest acuteness for observation, and supplied with the most perfectly obedient and skillful hand to do its bidding.”¹⁰⁴ And that meant Sargent was “non-existent as an artist.” Instead, he was a mere “illustrator” who “knew how to use for his purposes the discoveries of pure art”—those “purposes” being hopelessly bourgeois, given that “his values” were “the values of social and everyday life.”¹⁰⁵

In other words, Fry’s objections were twofold. As a founder of the aesthetic theory known as formalism, which defines art in terms of the process of its creation and its visual qualities instead of its content, he balked at Sargent’s style. And as a social critic, he found Sargent’s choice of subject matter equally offensive. Portraiture, in particular, was almost inherently incapable of satisfying his aesthetic criteria, because portraits are, almost by definition, about something.

Fry also charged that Sargent’s portraits lacked “psychological imagination.” They only offered the “superficial” impressions of his subjects, as if the artist had only just met them.¹⁰⁶ This obviously was baseless; Sargent’s portraits are striking for the degree to which they do present penetrating idealizations of their subjects rather than mere journalistic copies. Fry’s notion that Sargent merely depicted nature was, in reality, a testament to the painter’s skills. Far from creating a precise representation, Sargent abstracted from reality and carefully reconstructed it on the canvas, in the process elevating the ordinary into the realm of beauty and grace. It’s just that he did it so effectively that the paintings often appear marvelously realistic.

Yet Fry could not shake the sense that Sargent was “too fond of the sparkle and glitter of life,” and “harbor[ed] no imaginations that he could not easily avow at the afternoon tea he so brilliantly depicts.”¹⁰⁷ In short, the paintings lacked a social flavor adequate to Fry’s taste—they were, in today’s parlance, politically incorrect. “That [Sargent’s reputation] should have taken a nosedive right after his death,” said Louis Auchincloss in 1986, “is surely attributable in part to the distastefulness of his subject matter to liberal minds,” to whom paintings of “Yankee millionairesses” came to seem “socially irresponsible” and even “vicious.”¹⁰⁸ And, indeed, Fry viewed Sargent’s work as tainted by the fact that he did not repudiate “commercial materialism”—against which, Fry claimed, “the artist is and must always be in revolt.”¹⁰⁹ Capitalism contaminated art, Fry held, because “in the capitalistic state, diversion and prestige seem to me almost the only springs of artistic effort,” and “no art produced with a view to satisfying either of these wants can be good art.”¹¹⁰

The Collapse of Sargent’s Reputation

This allegation became cemented in the minds of intellectuals after Sargent’s death in 1925. Six years later, Lewis Mumford—a model for the character of Ellsworth Toohey in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead¹¹¹—called him a mere “illustrator” whose artistic skills could “not conceal the essential emptiness of [his] mind, or the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of a certain part of his execution.”¹¹² These condemnations still circulate today. Trevor Fairbrother, for instance, condemns Sargent as a “propagandist for the Edwardian ruling class” and complains that he failed “to participate in modern or avant-garde developments” or to embrace “the liberating and transgressive spirit of modernism,” due to “his middle-class need for approval and conventional acclaim.”¹¹³

Such accusations are absurd. For one thing, Sargent’s work did at times “transgress” the prejudices of his day, most notably Madame X. But more important, his aesthetic did not aim at transgression because his sense of life was not essentially contrary to the milieu in which he worked. Sargent was, indeed, a bourgeois artist—meaning, an artist devoted to commemorating and celebrating the values of life, particularly among the businessmen and society ladies who sat for him and for the growing middle class who admired him, especially in America.¹¹⁴ His art combined an appreciation of the gentle pleasures of life—relaxation, abundance, family, childhood—with a love of beauty, eloquence, dignity, and glamour. It reflects a conviction that, in the words of one Sargent biographer, life is “an unending procession of delight.”¹¹⁵ To Fry’s claim that Sargent seemed to have “no desire to transcend the mood of ordinary life,”¹¹⁶ one can imagine Sargent wondering why one should want to “transcend” something so lovely. To “transcend” or “transgress” these values would have been to betray what his art embraces; and to condemn him for celebrating, rather than disparaging such things, says more about the critic than about the artist. Fry’s complaint that Sargent had “no imaginations that he could not easily avow” in polite conversation implies that for art to be truly great or authentic requires rude, ugly, shameful, or countercultural imaginations—an assumption that has become an article of faith in much of the art world today but would have struck Sargent as bizarre.

Sargent’s art, wrote one close friend, was focused on “the more and more intimate understanding and enjoying [of] the world around him.”¹¹⁷ Fry and Fairbrother, by contrast, harbor an unspoken premise that the artist must be a misfit, and art countercultural, or even neurotic. This, however, ultimately is a type of mysticism in which the artist is expected to be a spokesman for otherworldly principles, his work a form of meditation at least, and a Jeremiad or memento mori at most, instead of testifying to living, breathing values. Fry’s formalism—like Cubism, Surrealism, and the rest—purported to be more modern, but actually was a regression from the secular sophistication and cosmopolitan complexity of the art of Sargent’s day into an aesthetic characterized by the distortions and crudity of the Middle Ages. Fry even celebrated the crayon scribblings of “untaught children” for their “enormous superiority” over the art of adults.¹¹⁸

Fry’s reactionary barbarism is clear in his assertion that art should aim at “the emotions resulting from the contemplation of form” because such emotions are “more universal (less particularized and colored by the individual history), more profound and more significant spiritually than any of the emotions which had to do with life.”¹¹⁹ Other purportedly modern art theories followed a similar path; psychological or political dogmas took the place of theology, but these theories all still viewed the artist as essentially the channeler of otherworldly revelations, and the resulting art literally was more primitive: drawn in intentionally crude styles, featuring sophomoric themes such as sexual repression, dreams, and political slogans, and purposefully eschewing nuance, elegance, and secularism of the 19th-century masters.

Sargent’s art was precisely about the emotions that have to do with life—and far from prioritizing the contemplation of pure form, it relishes just what Fry considered trivial: the intimate understanding and enjoyment of the world around us. In the process, it expressed something far beyond the reach of formalism or the other trends that were to follow: It expressed glamour.

The Sargent Revival

The “yes-saying” quality of Sargent’s paintings manifested what Professor Sirpa Salenius has called the “fusion” in 19th-century American art “of the sacred and the secular, spiritual and material, passionate and formal.”¹²⁰ Salenius ascribes this to the effort by American intellectuals to reconcile European Christian traditions with the new experiences of individualism, democracy, and capitalism. Whatever the validity of 19th-century religious doctrines, it is certainly true that many artists of the era strove to express the metaphysical profundity of the pursuit of happiness. This is what connects Sargent with Eakins and Homer: Their art articulated the spiritual significance of the abundant life, of individual initiative, and of beautiful experiences that were, for the first time, possible for those who lacked a noble ancestry.

Sargent took this experience to a new height because his work possessed a quality that Eakins’s and Homer’s lacked—namely, glamour, which Virginia Postrel defines not as an artistic style but as “an imaginative process that creates a specific, emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience’s hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.”¹²¹ In short, glamour conveys the theme of achievable escape from the mundane. And although the phenomenon probably always has existed, it only became a commonly understood concept during Sargent’s lifetime. The very word “glamour,” which previously had referred to a magic spell, took on the meaning we use today only at the dawn of the 20th century.

Interior in Venice by John Singer Sargent

More than any other painter of the day, Sargent spoke in this ineffable language. His paintings were glimpses of realized desire.¹²² Works such as The Wyndham Sisters (1899)¹²³ and Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears (1899)¹²⁴ capture the viewer’s (and, no doubt, the sitter’s) desire, not for utopia or heaven, but for grace, ease, and sophistication. And if glamour, as Postrel argues, “portrays luxuries as normal experiences, making them feel casually attainable,”¹²⁵ then surely An Interior in Venice (1898)¹²⁶ qualifies: It seems to invite the viewer into its atmosphere of relaxed elegance. This painting was, in fact, the very tea party to which Roger Fry so contemptuously referred—and yet when Sargent presented it to Ariana Curtis, who is depicted at the bottom right, she considered its casual air so inappropriate that she refused it.¹²⁷ (So much for Sargent not “transgressing” social prejudices.)

The Wyndham Sisters and Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears by John Singer Sargent

Relaxation may be the most consistent theme in Sargent’s art. He loved painting people at ease—relaxing in chairs, lying in the grass, painting with friends. And the comfort and lightness of his portraits only heightens the glamour. The perfect example is a lovely detail in The Wyndham Sisters, among his most luxuriant pictures—in which the middle lady, twenty-eight-year-old Pamela, fiddles absently with her wedding ring.¹²⁸ The viewer instantly sympathizes with the habit and feels oneself a part of the life that Sargent presents.

Along with relaxation, glamour is Sargent’s most distinctive quality and what marks his portrait work, particularly of women, as his greatest artistic achievement. More than any of his contemporaries, Sargent expressed the glamour that emerging capitalism made possible. Yet that is just what made him incomprehensible or unacceptable to later artists and critics who, largely for ideological reasons, considered glamour trivial, absurd, or even oppressive. And it explains why the revival of interest in Sargent in the early 1980s was largely aided by, of all people, Andy Warhol. Whatever Warhol’s faults, he at least never thought capitalism antithetical to art, and he appreciated Sargent’s celebrity portraiture. “He made everybody look glamorous,” said Warhol. “Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, every one of them has a different mood.”¹²⁹

Sargent’s Influence

Little wonder, then, that Sargent’s art has lasted. He exerted a strong influence on his era. Other, less famous contemporaries elaborated on his style, including John Lavery, Joaquín Sorolla, Charles Wellington Furst, and John White Alexander. He proved a major inspiration for the so-called Boston School, which led to marvelous works by Joseph DeCamp and Gretchen Woodman Rodgers. And his own students, including Xavier Martinez, John Young-Hunter, and Sybil Henry Jacobson, took their teacher’s influence particularly into American Western art—where they would help fashion a distinctive type of glamour.¹³⁰

Sargent’s influence, however, is most evident today not in painting but in high-fashion photography and film. Fashion photographer David Seidner was especially well-known for his admiration of Sargent and in 1998 honored the artist with a series of photos of the descendants of people who originally had posed for Sargent.¹³¹ Many of Seidner’s other photos evoked Sargent’s glamourous qualities, including Tanya Carlson¹³² and Amira Casar.¹³³ In 1999, Vogue published an entire series of photos of Nicole Kidman re-creating Madame X, Mrs. George Swinton, and other Sargent portraits.¹³⁴ A decade later, Harper’s Bazaar did the same thing with actress Julianne Moore.¹³⁵

The television series Downton Abbey relied heavily on Sargent for its imagery. The makers of Wonder Woman, too, have acknowledged their debt to Sargent,¹³⁶ as did the filmmakers Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, particularly in The Golden Bowl, their film based on the novel by Sargent’s friend Henry James.¹³⁷ Even Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? owes a debt to Sargent. Her gown was based on the black dress created for Rita Hayworth’s 1946 film Gilda by designer Jean Louis, who drew inspiration from Madame X.¹³⁸

The reason for these connections is clear: Sargent articulated a sense of effervescence, intrigue, and grandeur. Yet he did more than paint glamour. Unlike many of his imitators, his work expressed a vivid and affirmative sense of life. Though he himself sometimes said otherwise, his best work does express, and invite, a judgment—and that judgment is an embrace of the world, in its beauty and potential, be it in the solemnity of Mrs. George Swinton or the ease of Nonchaloir (1911).¹³⁹

Nonchaloir by John Singer Sargent

In the years after his death, leading critics, artists, and collectors turned away from such art, viewing the well-lived life that was the core of Sargent’s work either as trivial or as a cynical cover for “capitalist exploitation.” They preferred art that was either so abstract as to strike viewers as inert or that was explicitly propagandistic and devoted to political ends. The consequence was an aesthetic in which beauty was considered irrelevant or a tool of partisanship.

It was in defiance of these trends that the poet W. H. Auden insisted that art makes nothing happen. But he went on to say that it

. . . survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening.¹⁴⁰

Art does not make things happen, but it is a “way of happening”—a means of expressing a judgment of life, and its significance is deeper than the day-to-day transactional world with which “executives” seek to “tamper.” It asks us, rather, to step back and view life from a distance, one at which we can appreciate its entire arc while at the same time savoring a particular instant. Thus—if the artwork is successful—it “survives” beyond the “busy” moments and pronounces a statement that lasts. And because our actions are inspired by that fundamental judgment of life, art does, in the end, make things happen.

In the same way, art is not truly useless. Asked what he meant by saying that it was, Oscar Wilde answered in a characteristic paradox: “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers.”¹⁴¹ The experience of that joy, like life itself, exists for its own sake. So Sargent’s art, flowerlike, blossomed to show us its moment of joy. And although a kind of winter came later, that instant was not lost but—thanks to the artist’s magnificent skill—preserved for all time.

About Timothy Sandefur

Timothy Sandefur is vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute and is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard.

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