Carol Lowrey
John Singer Sargent (1867-1925) was a versatile artist who painted landscapes, still lifes, intimate genre scenes and religious allegories. However, the first thing I think about when his name comes up is his activity as a grand-manner portraitist. Without doubt, he was the most successful and prolific portrait painter of the Edwardian era, producing more than 800 likenesses over the course of his career and attaining the reputation in England and the United States as the “Van Dyck” of his day. What was it that made Sargent’s work so special? It was a combination of technique––soft, buttery brushwork and a sensitive handling of color––coupled with his ability to capture the look and personality of his cultured, upper-class clients, among them such notables as Mrs. Henry G. Marquand, wife of the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner and the architect Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes; as a Boston critic wrote in 1888, “Style is the predominant characteristic of [Sargent]; all of his pictures are permeated with it. Nothing is commonplace; nothing is conventional. There is . . . [a] palpable atmosphere of refinement, ease and––tranchons le mot––aristocracy.”The sense of privilege and gentility we associate with Sargent’s portraits comes across beautifully in this depiction of Helen Brice (1874-1950) (pictured above), from 1907. A daughter of Calvin Stewart Brice (1854-1898), an Ohio-born railway magnate and U.S. senator, Helen was a well known figure in the social circles of Manhattan and Newport during the first half of the twentieth century. She’s shown here at the age of thirty-three wearing an elegant gown and cashmere shawl, posed with her shoulders back and her head held in a way that gives her a proud, regal bearing. Her gaze is averted away from the viewer, endowing her with a sense of inner contemplation and poise. I wonder how she felt about sitting for the famous Sargent, who had painted luminaries on both sides of the Atlantic. In my research on Miss Brice, I found out that she never married, but she led a full (and one would like to think, happy) life replete with balls, dinner parties and nights at the opera, charity events, travel abroad and leisurely summers in Rhode Island.
The Brice portrait was exhibited at important venues in New York (see article above), London, Venice, and elsewhere, and it was also included in Sargent’s memorial exhibition, held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1925. Retained in the family until 1980, it is also among the last portraits Sargent would create, a final bloom in the triumphant bouquet of a career; by about 1910, tired by the demands imposed by his portrait work, he painted fewer likenesses in order to devote most of his time to informal oils and broadly brushed watercolors inspired by his travels abroad.
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