Category: John Singer Sargent

Walking the galleries

On Sundays, I often camp out in one gallery or another at the National Gallery of Art and let one painting or room of paintings ignite some thought, instigate some scene in whatever I am working on. Between three museums on the National mall, I spend upwards of 8-10 hours on Sundays. Yes, it is delightful, but it is work time. Art recharges my work batteries. This past year, I have missed this weekly ritual.

Today, I breezed through, visiting rooms that I do not normally haunt for hours. But I started someplace familiar.

Rouen Cathedral, West Façade

40 years ago, Connie Hungerford introduced me to Monet. She explained his attention to light and changing light, focusing on his series work—Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and Waterlilies. Because I had studied Gothic Art and Architecture with Michael Cothren, the Rouen Cathedral series drew my attention. The play of light through and in the crenellations and layered portals gives Monet his subject: light. In Rouen Cathedral, West Facade at the National Gallery of Art, Monet makes it seem like light has fallen like snow. It accumulates and covers surfaces of the cathedral. In this painting, light has substance—perhaps negligible, but there it is. Of course, this is an illusion; light has no weight. In fifteen minutes, the earth will turn enough to change the effect, to give some other momentary impression.

At this moment, though, Monet’s insight is that light does have weight; it can obscure as well as reveal. The glinting ray of sunlight can blind us, blur our vision, and cause us to mis-see. Or, rather, it can give us a new vision. “I didn’t see that before.” Monet’s paintings have continued to surprise me over the past 40 years. Light falls like snow? Why not.

Symphony in White and Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White

In Gallery 69, Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (1862) has a title that makes clear that the model is a vehicle for Whistler’s intentions—to show the complexities of white. Nonetheless, the girl (the model Joanna Hiffernan) is not a blank. Across the room, Sargent’s portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (1883) stares back across the 20 years that separate the paintings. Some crafty curator has juxtaposed these two “White” women. Hiffernan was born ten years before “Daisy “White, and so, jiggering the ages, she is ten years younger in the painting. She is a bit awestruck in Whistler’s painting, perhaps because she has been reduced by Whistler to a small part in a play of white. “Daisy,” ten years her senior in Sargent’s painting, is self-assured. Her dress is no less “painted,” no less a bravura effort on the part of Sargent. Without denigrating Whistler’s work, Sargent imbues his painting with personality and painterliness.

And whoever put these paintings in a room on opposing walls: Well done!

Lady with a Lute

If you know Dewing from his diaphanous women—in paintings like Before Sunrise or In the Garden—“ his Lady with a Lute shows how precise he can be. He captures not only the craft of the luthier but the richness of the model’s dress, the shadow on her neck, and the line of her jaw. All these are still present in his dreamier paintings: his precision in depicting women’s scapulae is nothing less than erotically obsessive. Lady with a Lute delights me because it shows what had always been contained and not so much hidden as missed.

I think about this in the context of Monet—we see the impressionist technique and miss the underlying details: all that straw, the flamboyant architecture, the ripples in the ponds he built. In Dewing, that lute shows up again and again, but so do those sexy shoulders. It is hard to see the thread in a piece of cloth, but there it is. We often only see it when it comes unraveled, but why wait?

Wealth and Benefits of the Spanish Monarchy under Charles III

I think that one of my favorite titles of a work of art is: Wealth and Benefits of the Spanish Monarchy under Charles III (1762) by Tiepolo. It doesn’t hurt that the painting is ornately lovely.

Daniel in the Lions Den

And finally, I watched as a couple stood in front of this Rubens and asked to have their photo taken. I get it, it’s a painting of lions (and that in and of itself is pretty cool). But Daniel in the Lions Den stirs some very specific messages about faith and, in particular, Jewish faith. Yes, the lions are cool, but you might ask: are you relating to Daniel or the Lions?

Contradiction and Awe

In the Smithsonian American Art Museum, John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler hangs in a room on the second floor. The room features paintings of men and women from the Gilded Age—the last great flourishing of robber baron capitalism in the United States. Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler is a descendant of Peter Stuyvestant, a member of the Astor family,and became part of “the 400”—the unofficial roster of New York’s finest families.

Sargent painted her while she was in London for her brother’s wedding. She is 26, the eldest daughter, self-possessed—as she needed to be since both of her parents died by the time she was 11. The description on the museum website points to the juxtaposition between her controlled gaze and the turmoil of “[h]er arms, leg-of-mutton sleeves, and the pillows [as they] seem to wrestle with one another.” That’s fair enough. Her gaze, direct and at the viewer, is strident, almost an affront, “You think you see me?” she asks.

Museums are fabulous places, in no small part because of the juxtapositions of things. Across the mall this is made clear by the exhibit of Charles Lang Freer’s ideas about exhibiting like objects that were made hundreds if not thousands of years apart. Here at SAAM, the exhibitors have put the portrait of Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler in a place where her gaze extends out into and across the hall. Standing across the hall, one can still sense her stridency.

What’s in the room across the hall? Undine, Illusions, Spring Dance, An Eclogue, The White Parasol, and Woman with Red Hair.

None of the women depicted in these works stares fiercely at the viewer. They either stare off to the right or left, or are engaged in a closed unit—with other women, or in the case of “Illusions,” a child or putto. Several are naked, or draped to reveal their sensual forms. Or, as the titles suggest, are to be known for the attributes (hair, parasol). The women her are used as subject matter (“The White Parasol”) or at the service of allegory (“Illusions,” “The Eclogue”).

Spring Dance. Across the hall.

I cannot be certain what Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler felt about art and female representations. That she was part of a world that valued culture (her brother, Robert Wilson Chanler was a painter) is fairly certain. By 1893, sitting for a portrait by Sargent would not have been an inconsiderable achievement. But in this museum—in every museum—are countless works that transform the sitter into something at the service of the artist (who is often working at the service of another). She must have known that.

Sargent captures her singular defiance. She may be beautiful. She may be 26 (and years yet from marriage). She may be wealthy—or wealthy enough, say her rings and her brooch. She is not too young, not too self-aware as to hold our gaze with hers. Sargent said she had “the face of the Madonna and the eyes of a child,” but his painting reveals a fire that exceeds anything childish. She is determined.

“Match me,” she tells us. “I will not go quietly.”

I return to the SAAM—or the hall National Gallery, or the Freer and Sackler Galleries—because getting caught in the web of juxtapositions helps untangle me from whatever I am stuck in from the rest of the week. The juxtapositions reinvigorate me. Roethke writes in “The Waking,” “This shaking keeps me steady.” Do they contradict themselves? I hope so. I count on it.

How are the juxtapositions I find here, in these places and spaces, different from those in the world? There are a web of contradictions waiting around every corner—cocksure hypocrisies and beguiling changes of mind. Why do I need more? What’s the point of contradiction contained in or by art?

There is a difference. I am drawn to a world of things and ideas that acknowledge the diversity, that are not afraid to make contradiction and juxtaposition a large part of the message. Yes, just as there are people who insist on “I know the truth”—and then brook no contradiction—there are works that proclaim their own monolithic messages—“Look on ye mighty and despair.”

And yet like a cathedral, or like a mountain, a canyon, or an act of genuine kindness, they can awaken a sense of awe, and, if you are open to the experience, that sense of awe blasts away preconceptions. And unlike things found in nature—as awe-inspiring as those are—works of art made by human hands, perhaps because they were made by human hands, despite the petty hypocrisies and even the pointed cruelties awaken a human sized sense of awe. I can stand before the human sublime and feel the full terror (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich—Every angel is terrible, Rilke), but the terror is a tearing away of everything else, everything I thought I knew, and an opening to what is suddenly possible. I stand and proclaim, “I do not know!”

I feel rather a bit like Scrooge when he declares: “I don’t know what day of the month it is!… I don’t know how long I’ve been among the Spirits. I don’t know anything. I’m quite a baby. Never mind. I don’t care. I’d rather be a baby…” Imagine that, being 18, 25, 38, or 60 and being like a baby, ready to learn everything as if for the first time. To be wise and to be willing to be surprised.

So, I return, and step between Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler and whatever it was she held in her gaze, and I let myself be cast into the room across the hall, and all the rooms across all the halls, and find, once again, some awe and uncertainty. I can match that.