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Updated: June 23, 2025
I am, however, drawing to the end of my remarks without having mentioned a dozen of those brilliant triumphs in the field of portraiture with which Mr. Sargent's name is preponderantly associated. I jumped from his "Carolus Duran" to the masterpiece of 1881 without speaking of the charming "Madame Pailleron" of 1879, or the picture of this lady's children the following year.
And who sits in this delicate boudoir perfumed with a faint scent, a sachet-scented pocket-handkerchief? Surely one of Sargent's ladies. Perhaps the lady in the shot-silk dress who sat on an eighteenth-century French sofa two years ago in the Academy, her tiny, plump, curved white hand, drawn as well in its interior as in exterior limits, hanging over the gilt arm of the sofa.
Sargent's portrait of the wearer, so that their estimate now was but the endorsement of an estimate already made. Yet their impression of the Duke was above all a spiritual one.
Before the freedom and certainty of Sargent's art criticism stands abashed. His portraits have a wonderful effect of vitality, and a purity and brilliancy of color which have never been surpassed; but most noteworthy of all, he achieves the supreme triumph of the portrait painter by comprehending and displaying character. He shows the very soul of his sitter, without malice but also without mercy. Only towards children does he show tenderness, and then he paints with a wonderful and varied charm. Not only of people but of places does he give the character a room takes on personality; silks, velvets, furniture, bric-
"Just remember that the only person I could incriminate you to would be Mr. Piper, and not even there very much, due to Sargent's melodramatic appearance in the middle of dinner.
It is likewise so, of course, with many another genuine painter; but in Sargent's case the process by which the object seen resolves itself into the object pictured is extraordinarily immediate. It is as if painting were pure tact of vision, a simple manner of feeling.
Many, or rather most, of Mr. Sargent's sitters have been French, and he has studied the physiognomy of this nation so attentively that a little of it perhaps remains in the brush with which to-day, more than in his first years, he represents other types. This gentleman stands up in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the prestance of a princely Vandyck.
Amos Kendall's Autobiography is, unfortunately, hardly more than a collection of papers and scattered memoranda. Nathan Sargent's Public Men and Events, 1817-1853, 2 vols. , consists of chatty sketches, with an anti-Jackson slant. Other books of contemporary reminiscence are Lyman Beecher's Autobiography, 2 vols. All things considered, there is no more important nonofficial source for the period.
"The judgment of future generations on the use of gas may well be influenced by the pathetic appeal of Sargent's picture of the first `Mustard Gas' casualties at Ypres, but it must not be forgotten in looking at that picture that 75 per cent. of the blinded men he drew were fit for duty within three months, and that had their limbs and nerves been shattered by the effects of high explosive, their fate would have been infinitely worse."
Well I motioned back at him to shut up but of course he couldn't see me and he thought I hadn't heard what he said so he said it over again so then I thought maybe he hadn't heard the sargent's orders so I whispered to him that he wasn't supposed to talk.
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