"It is delicious to be at Broadway": John Singer Sargent and Henry James in the Cotswolds
A post about art friends
Hi, friends, and happy Easter to those who celebrate! I’ll be back with another Midlife Authors post next time. But this week, a post about art and the early years of a long friendship.
A few weeks ago, I went with my mom and daughter to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where I encountered this John Singer Sargent watercolor:
It’s a watercolor sketch, rough and unfinished, called “Two Girls.” One of the young women/girls looks up from her reading, and the other sits other on the floor, curled onto the seated woman’s lap the way a child might.
This sketch comes from one of the summers that John spent in the Cotswold village of Broadway, where a small group of American and English artists created an artists colony, around 1885-1890. The others—Americans Edwin Austin (Ned) Abbey and Frank Millet and their wives; British artists Alfred Parsons and Frederick Barnard and their wives; the writer Edmund Gosse—were new friends, introduced to John by Henry James.
And Henry James was occasionally part of this group. He was older than most of the group, in his early forties, but he apparently slipped into their routine, spending his mornings writing in an attic and listening to the group music-making or theatrical sessions at night. “It is delicious to be at Broadway and to be one of the irresponsible profane—not to have to draw,” he wrote.
A year or so before, Henry had persuaded John to leave Paris behind, and though John had taken a studio in London, in Chelsea, his work prospects were uncertain. He’d gotten a few English portrait commissions, but the Madame X debacle still hovered, and the Royal Academy was not keen on his more provocative portraits like Dr. Pozzi. And people seemed to hate his 1884 group portrait of the Vickers sisters—in a Pall Mall Gazette poll, it was voted it the worst painting at the RA exhibit that year—too informal, too French, people said.
John’s summers in the Cotswolds must have felt like a reprieve from his uncertain status. He could sketch outdoors every day, sometimes in floating studios in rowboats, and sketch his friends (see the portrait sketch of Lilly Millet, below). There was tennis in the afternoons, and piano and singing and skit-making at night.
John could also obsess over one picture, the way he did with the project that eventually became “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” (below), a painting that feels rather English, like an illustration from a children’s book.
Henry James, meanwhile, had had a huge success with The Portrait of a Lady a few years before, and was in the middle of serializing The Princess Cassimasima and writing short stories. But he too was trying to find his footing in London—yes, he was social, and he had friends, including these Broadway artists, but he remained an outsider, and making enough money was always an issue.
Here’s a pencil sketch John made of Henry—it took about an hour—one of those summers:
John and Henry had more in common with one another than with the rest of the Broadway group—both Americans who grew up partly (Henry) or completely (John) abroad; both more comfortable in Paris than in London; both decidedly unmarried. Henry introduced John to English artists and writers, and John introduced Henry to French artists and writers. Did anything beyond conversation happen during those Cotswold visits? No one knows, but they were good friends—good art friends—and because they worked in different realms, they didn’t compete with one another. Henry wrote about John’s work, in letters and reviews.
Here’s excerpt from a review Henry wrote for Harper’s:
“There is no greater work of art than a great portrait—a truth to be constantly taken to heart by a painter holding in his hands the weapon that Mr. Sargent wields. The gift that he possesses he possesses completely—the immediate perception of the end and of the means. Putting aside the question of the subject…the highest result is achieved when to this element of quick perception a certain faculty of brooding reflection is added.…I mean the quality in the light of which the artist sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, enlarges and humanizes the technical problem.”
And John and Henry, despite their uncertainties, were about to become exemplars of their crafts: John would become the most renowned portrait painter in Great Britain, Europe, and the US (a status that he’d later grow to despise and give up) and Henry would soon be known as The Master, mainly for the long (and long-sentenced) novels he wrote after the turn of the century (The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove).
But for now, John and Henry were in between, maybe wondering where they fit in the world, but always working—even during, maybe especially during, those Cotswold summers.
Love this moment in time you’ve captured that speaks to the resiliency and community necessary to being an artist.
A pleasure to return to Sargent with you, Sarah. Reading Henry James' observations about portraiture, I am once again mystified that Sargent did not esteem his portraits more highly. His murals at the Boston Public Library, which he apparently viewed as his masterwork, strike me as kitsch of the highest order.