Reluctant Chronicler

Within their ornate frames, the Edwardian ladies & gentlemen looked just as the most fashionable artists of their day had found them--rich, well-bred, proud, and usually a trifle bored. These proper people, in proper painting, hung last week in Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum celebrating New York City's 50th anniversary as an incorporated big city (TIME, June 7).

There was Giovanni Boldini's wispy Duchess of Marlborough propped stiffly on her spindly divan; Whistler had caught bewhiskered Theodore Duret wistfully holding a lady's opera cape in some carpeted corridor. And William M. Chase had come upon the bemonocled Whistler sporting an absurd little cane and striking his dandy's pose. But most of the Edwardians represented at the museum (the Phelps Stokeses, the Wyndham sisters, Mme. Gautreau, Miss Ada Rehan, Henry Marquand) had sought out, or been sought out by, the slickest and most fashionable painter of their day to immortalize them --John Singer Sargent.

Hals Remembered. Painter Sargent was 45 when Edward VII became king, and it was already quite the thing to be "painted by Sargent." He was a portly, generous gentleman, more at home with his fellow expatriate Henry James than with the eccentric Bohemians of the art world. He resisted the Pre-Raphaelites and "Ruskin, don't you know . . . silly old thing." He ignored the principles of art for art's sake, detested Gauguin and Van Gogh. His advice to one of his own disciples: "Begin with Franz Hals, copy and study Franz Hals, after that go to Madrid and copy Velasquez . . ."

In his cheery studio on London's Tite Street, he worked doggedly at his portraits, muttering behind his easel when things didn't work out the way he wanted, "Gainsborough would have done it! ... Gainsborough would have done it." Sometimes he held his sitters' attention by painting his own nose red or pretending to eat his cigar.

He became so used to his sitters' criticisms that he began to define a portrait as "a likeness in which there was something wrong about the mouth." But he always refused to change his work. Once, a lady complained about the way he had done her nose. "Oh, you can alter a little thing like that," said Sargent, quickly handing her the portrait, "when you get it home."

He was amazed at the fortune his painting brought him ("It can't be mine," he said once when someone told him his bank balance. "They've made a mistake at the bank; it must belong to someone else"). He felt miscast as a portraitist: "Portrait painting is a pimp's profession."

Portraits Forgotten. Late in life, he tried to change. "No more paughtraits," he once wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them, and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes." During World War I, he trundled off to try his hand at battle scenes ("I suppose there is no fighting on Sundays," he remarked to a general at the front). He tried landscapes, character sketches ("a lot of mugs in ... charcoal") and watercolors which he scornfully labeled "Triple Bosh," "Blokes," "Idiots of the Mountains," "Intertwingles." But they were never enough to free him.

"I do not judge," Sargent once said of his portraits. "I only chronicle." Whether he liked it or not, Sargent's faithful chronicles, with all their style and grace, are what he is remembered for, a quarter century later.

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