John Singer Sargent

A Living Immortal

The famous Wertheimer portraits by John Sargent, American, are once more the nine days' talk of London. Extremely unflattering, scrupulously accurate, they portray the immediate family of a distinguished English Jew, Asher Wertheimer. They were hung Jan. 8 in the National Gallery, and with the event John Sargent became a classic in his own lifetime. Now a strong group in the House of Commons seeks their removal.

John Sargent is the only individual for whom the National Gallery has ever broken its rule against accepting the work of a living artist. Ihe gloomy, smoke-darkened pile facing Trafalgar Square and the Nelson Monument is as British an institution as Westminster Abbey. To be honored by either, artists have had wait for death.

Is it because John Sargent is American that so vigorous an opposition to the portraits has appeared?

Asked this question, Sir John Butler, leader of the protest in the House, replied: "Is Sargent an American? He has lived here so long that I had forgotten."

The theory that anti-Semitism caused the objections is disposed ot thus: Asher Wertheimer, in his will, left the paintings to the nation, in gratitude for the way the Jew is treated in England."

Sir John Butler gave three reasons for his opposition to the gallery s action: 1) "the paintings are not up to Sargent's own high standard ; 2) "it is unwise to break tradition and accept paintings before time had proved their excellence"; 3) "in any case, nine paintings of the same family by the same artist are more than were needed for one wall of a single gallery."

The Member from Oxford University suggested that "these clever but extremely repulsive pictures" might be given a room to themselves.

Like many of the greatest American artists, Sargent is hardly American at all, except in blood. He was born in Florence (1856), studied in Paris, has always lived in London.

But his name has all the flavor of a national tradition to the general public. In novels of ten years ago, if a fashionable heroine wished a resplendent portrait as the finishing grace of her career, Sargent was inevitably called in .

His art is a different matter. Like Helen of Troy's beauty, it is more often glowingly mentioned than accurately described. But three things might be said of it: it is technically practically flawless; it has beauty of color and vigorous line achieved with the fewest possible strokes; occasionally it fails in insight in spite of Sargent's far-famed "ability to render character." He is a marvelous ob- server of externals and sometimes-- but not always--of inner truths about his sitters.

The critics are widely divided about the excellence of the Wertheimer portraits. One--Homer St. Gaudens-- thinks them Sargent at his best. He also considers Sargent to be the greatest painter in England today.

But whatever the final fate of the disputed portraits, Sargent's position in the National Gallery is secure. The gallery hung--several years ago--his fine portrait of Lord Ribblesdale. Sargent, 'in his middle sixties, has become an "old master." Without dying, he has joined Reynolds, Romney, Raeburn as an " immortal British art.