Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, by John Singer Sargent (1892)

We continue our look at several pictures in the current exhibition at The Frick Collection, showcasing 10 masterworks from the Scottish National Gallery, with the picture in the show I loved most, Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw, painted in 1892 by your correspondent’s favorite painter, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

Sargent was one of the greatest, and most prolific, of fin de siècle artists.  A gifted portraitist, Sargent was also painter of many magnificent landscapes, a champion draughtsman and watercolorist, and he also painted the mighty frescoes found in the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Contemporary art historians and critics – largely a benighted lot – are troubled by Sargent and his achievement.  His talent is too prodigious to dismiss, but he does not comfortably fit with either within the Academic establishment or inside the Impressionist movement, both of which were dominant at that time.  What Sargent was, in short, was his own thing, an artist unique to himself who managed also to wonderfully illustrate his own time.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, to American expatriate parents.  He would study in Florence and Paris, and live in London and Boston.  He was one of most celebrated artists of his time, famous for his “society portraits.”  Near the end of his life, he visited the battlefields in World War I France as an official British War artist.  His frescoes for the Boston Public Library occupied his later years; they are both magnificent and completely unlike his other work.

The painting visiting the Frick is a portrait of Lady Gertrude Agnew, the wife of Sir Andrew Agnew, 9^th Baronet.  She was born in 1865, and was all of 27 when Sargent immortalized her.  There is some irony in the portrait hanging in the Frick: in 1922, when the family hit financial troubles, they tried to sell the work to Helen Clay Frick in 1922.  Foolish woman – she turned it down.  Lady Agnew herself would die in 1932, following a long illness.

This is, by any critical and aesthetic yardstick, a magnificent picture.  It is easily the most striking piece in the exhibition – and is strategically placed in the center wall facing the viewer upon entering.  (The magnificent Constable, covered in these pages last week, is lost instantly – such is the power of the Sargent.)

Among the many component parts of Sargent’s genius was a deep and abiding understanding of the color blue.  It is the dominant color in his work, and he uses it to great effect both alone and in combination and contrast to other colors.  His use of blue here is nothing short of splendid, morphing through different shadings, contrasts with white, gold and pale red, and setting the mood of elegant repose.  The notion of Sargent the colorist is essential to understanding his sense of composition and how he saw the world around him.

Typical of the time, there is an Asian influence, consistent with the then-current Aesthetic Movement of things Japanese and Chinese.  This underscores that Lady Agnew is not only a lady of taste and refinement, but up-to-date with current modes of aesthetic expression. 

Let us look also at some of the things perhaps not blatant at first glance:  note, for example, how Sargent suggests the flesh of her left arm under the gauzy material of her dress.  Look at how the pattern on the chair is beautifully rendered without being stuffy or academic; much is suggested, but all that is necessary is said.

The pose is quite special.  Notice how her body is twisted to face one way, while the chair is adjusted to face the other – both creating the tension of a V.  (The power of this pose is underscored by how Lady Agnew clutches the base of her chair.)  And in the center of that V, Lady Agnew looks straight out at the viewer with a gaze frank, strong and enigmatic.  Last week we were looking at the portrait of Allan Ramsay’s wife; both Ramsay and Sargent are able to write volumes with the expressions of their subjects.  Where Ramsay relates a placid and affectionate beauty, Sargent paints a woman elegant, commanding and hypnotic.  She is fully aware of her status in life, her own intellectual and artistic attainments, and her own power as a woman. 

Finally, Lady Agnew holds a blossom in her lap, the white of the petals offset by her lilac sash.  Though literally draped in beauty, Sargent paints a figure of power and presence – a formidable woman indeed, and a perfect centerpiece to this splendid show.

Tomorrow: A special Thanksgiving message!

The Japanese Fan, by Gustave Leonard De Jonghe (c.1865)

Good heavens, I love this picture.  In the original French, the title for this painting is L’admiratrice du Japon; translated into English, the title The Japanese Fan is a double pun, making reference to the fan on the floor, and the woman herself.

It was painted by Gustave Leonard de Jonghe, who was born on February 4, 1829 in Courtrai, Belgium. He was a painter of figures and genre scenes, working in both oils and watercolors.  De Jonghe was the son of Jan Baptiste de Jonghe, himself a talented artist and Gustave’s first teacher.  (How often have we come across artists initially trained by their fathers?)  Afterwards, Gustave continued his artistic studies with the acclaimed master teachers and artists, Louis Gallant and Francois Josef Navez (1787 – 1869). Gustave would also study under the famed Belgian artist, Alfred Stevens (1828-1906).

De Jonghe began working in Paris and beginning in1850, exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon and continued to do so throughout his career. The Paris Salon awarded him with a third place medal in 1863 and, that same year, he received a medal in Amsterdam.  Honors increased in 1864, when Belgian King named him Chevalier de l’Ordre de Leopold.

In 1882, de Jonghe suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and returned to Brussels. In 1884, he moved to Antwerp, where he would die in January 1893.  Most of his work now rests in private collections, though several significant paintings can be found at the Musee d’Orsay, Paris, and The Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia.

In 1855, Gustave de Jonghe moved from Belgium to Paris and exhibited regularly in the Salon for the next thirty years.  This period was the dawn of the Aesthetic Movement, which celebrated the beauty and delicacy of blue and white china, and the subtle coloration and grace found in an idealized view of Japanese living.  The Japanese and blue and white china craze would later enthrall such diverse figures as James Whistler (1834-1903), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and de Jonghe’s own teacher, Alfred Stevens.  Collecting china and Japanese clothing and kimonos became a mania in major European cities, and often served as shorthand for refinement and delicacy of taste.  (Catalogs or picture books of Japanese scenes lie at our subject’s feet.)

The woman in the picture is obviously a fan of all things Japanese; and is the focus of the painting.  The Japanese fan, though, which may also be the point of the title, is simply an object on the floor.  The composition centers on the confrontation between the bird and the young woman which has, it appears, caused chaos in the room.  It is uncertain whether the woman is disciplining the cockatoo or the bird is threatening her.  To underscore the whimsy of the piece, the violent scene on the Japanese screen behind her reinforces the impression of a conflict between the two antagonists.

The wit of the picture is matched by de Jonghe’s masterful execution and composition.  Though the Japanese influence would later mean much to the Impressionists, de Jonghe flawlessly delineates kimono, dresser, china and screen.   Also precise is the subject’s expression, easily recognizable to any pet owner, just wait until I get my hands on you….

Percy Bysshe Shelly by John Addington Symonds (1978)

We here at The Jade Sphinx are always interested in the lives of great artists; and if the biography is written by one of the preeminent aesthetes of his day, all the better.

Sadly, outside of a handful of devotees, few remember the great writer, biographer, poet, essayist and aesthete John Addington Symonds (1840—1893).  Like most aesthetes, Symonds had a personal and emotional connection to the Italian Renaissance.  He would write a masterful, seven volume history of the era (Renaissance in Italy, 1875-1886), a splendid biography of Michelangelo (1893), and translations of Cellini’s autobiography (1888) and Michelangelo’s sonnets (1878; the first English translation of the painter’s poetry).

Symonds was also deeply devoted to Hellenism, writing Studies of the Greek Poets (1873-1876), which more closely aligned him with the Aesthetic Movement, and he wrote several volumes of poetry, as well.

A mind and aesthetic so protean, however, ranged across history to find congenial subjects.  He wrote of Ben Johnson (1886), Sir Philip Sidney (1886) and Walt Whitman (1893).  However, one of his more interesting biographies is of the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1878).

It may seem strange that we are emphasizing more the biographer than the biographee, but for Symonds biography and criticism were merely a mode of autobiography.  While we learn a great deal about Shelley (1792-1822) in this volume, we learn even more about Symonds.

Shelley was one of the greatest of Romantic poets.  He was a political radical and champion of the underdog.  He was an important part of a circle of poets and writers that included Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Thomas Love Peacock and his wife, Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein).  He was also involved with other politically progressive thinkers of the day, including William Godwin (Mary’s father), and influenced the political thinking of Henry David Thoreau.  After his death, Shelley became the idol of figures as diverse as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and W. B. Yeats.

Though he died just before his 30^th birthday, Shelley’s literary output is remarkable for its virtuosity, its lyricism and its breadth of intellectual scope.  What might have been had he lived longer must remain a mystery, as the poet drowned in a sudden storm off the Gulf of Spezia in his sailing boat, the Don Juan.  The boat had been custom-built for the poet, and sank.  Shelley’s body was cremated on the beach near Viareggio.  Surprisingly, the poet’s heart would not burn, no matter the degree of heat and flame, and his widow took it away with her.

The Funeral of Shelley

Such a Romantic figure would be irresistible to a sensibility like Symonds’, and it is clear that the later aesthete falls, to some degree, in love with his subject.  Here is Symonds on Shelley’s boyhood:

Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained unaltered through the short space of life allowed him. Loving, innocent, sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing his inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude, Shelley passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid vision which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of men. The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes. The reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in a nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his immediate contemporaries.

Here Symonds describes the physical appearance of the poet:  His eyes were blue, unfathomably dark and lustrous. His hair was brown; but very early in life it became grey, while his unwrinkled face retained to the last a look of wonderful youth. It is admitted on all sides that no adequate picture was ever painted of him. Mulready is reported to have said that he was too beautiful to paint. And yet, although so singularly lovely, he owed less of his charm to regularity of feature or to grace of movement, than to an indescribable personal fascination.

It is clear that Symonds was besotted by Shelley, and that his feelings for the poet cloud his vision.  He blithely excuses some of the poet’s most egregious behavior, and sponges away sometimes deadly effect he had on others.  Shelley becomes, for Symonds, an ideal; a swain of infinite beauty and even greater promise.  Near the close of the book, Symonds writes:

Shelley in his lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the conviction that he was the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever met. The same conviction is forced upon his biographer. During his four last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of twenty-nine, he stood upon the height of his most glorious achievement, ready to unfold his wings for a yet sublimer flight. At that moment, when life at last seemed about to offer him rest, unimpeded activity, and happiness, death robbed the world of his maturity. Posterity has but the product of his cruder years, the assurance that he had already outlived them into something nobler, and the tragedy of his untimely end.

Like many who value art above mere fact, Symonds was incapable of resisting Shelley’s romantic charm.  The book remains a revealing portrait of both subject and author.

Pliny the Younger and His Mother at Miseno During the Eruption of Vesuvius, by Angelica Kauffman, 1785

We continue our look at Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807), one of two female painters inducted into the Royal Academy at its inception (the other being Mary Moser, 1744-1819).  Taught by her painter father, Kauffman displayed extraordinary talent at an early age.  She moved to Rome in 1763, where she met Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768), antiquarian and art historian who would prove to be one of the most powerful influences on an Aesthetic Movement he would never live to see.  Kauffman painted his portrait, along with other such luminaires as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832).

From 1766 to 1781, she lived in London, where she worked as a decorator and was instrumental in the founding of the Royal Academy.  After marrying painter Antonio Zucchi, she moved to Rome and lived among Continental European artists. 

Kauffman mainly painted history pictures and mythological subjects, where she displayed sentimental notes and a refined sense of color.  In today’s picture, Pliny the Younger and His Mother at Miseno During the Eruption of Vesuvius (1785), Kauffman dramatically depicts the destruction of the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, both doomed to be buried by mud and lava following the eruption of Vesuvius (AD 79).  Kauffman focuses on a family scene to illustrate the horror of the moment.  Here, Pliney is clearly interrupted from his studies with his mother by news of the catastrophe.  The volcano erupts in the background, and the resulting storm creates a tumultuous sea.  The mother, more in-the-moment than her son, uses her headpiece to protect herself from the tragedy; her scholarly son needs to be roused from his books and papers by a messenger before he notices. 

Pliney’s letter to the historian Tacitus is a first-hand account of the tragedy, and the starting point of Kauffman’s imaginings:

My dear Tacitus,

You ask me to write you something about the death of my uncle so that the account you transmit to posterity is as reliable as possible.   I am grateful to you, for I see that his death will be remembered forever if you treat it [sc. in your Histories]. He perished in a   devastation of the loveliest of lands, in a memorable disaster shared by peoples and cities, but this will be a kind of eternal life for him.  Although he wrote a great number of enduring works himself, the imperishable nature of your writings will add a great deal to his survival. Happy are they, in my opinion, to whom it is given either to do something worth writing about, or to write something worth reading; most happy, of course, those who do both. With his own books and yours, my uncle will be counted among the latter. It is therefore with great pleasure that I take up, or rather take upon myself the task you have set me.

He was at Misenum in his capacity as commander of the fleet on the 24th of August, when between 2 and 3 in the afternoon my mother drew his attention to a cloud of unusual size and appearance. He had had a sunbath, then a cold bath, and was reclining after dinner with his books. He called for his shoes and climbed up to where he could get the best view of the phenomenon.  The cloud was rising from a mountain -- at such a distance we couldn't tell which, but afterwards learned that it was Vesuvius. I can best describe its shape by likening it to a pine tree. It rose into the sky on a very long "trunk" from which spread some "branches." I imagine it had been raised by a sudden blast, which then weakened, leaving the cloud unsupported so that its own weight caused it to spread sideways. Some of the cloud was white, in other parts there were dark patches of dirt and ash. The sight of it made the scientist in my uncle determined to see it from closer at hand.

He ordered a boat made ready. He offered me the opportunity of going along, but I preferred to study -- he himself happened to have set me a writing exercise. As he was leaving the house he was brought a letter from Tascius' wife Rectina, who was terrified by the looming danger. Her villa lay at the foot of Vesuvius, and there was no way out except by boat. She begged him to get her away. He changed his plans. The expedition that started out as a quest for knowledge now called for courage. He launched the quadriremes and embarked himself, a source of aid for more people than just Rectina, for that delightful shore was a populous one. He hurried to a place from which others were fleeing, and held his course directly into danger. Was he afraid? It seems not, as he kept up a continuous observation of the various movements and shapes of that evil cloud, dictating what he saw.

Ash was falling onto the ships now, darker and denser the closer they went. Now it was bits of pumice, and rocks that were blackened and burned and shattered by the fire. Now the sea is shoal; debris from the mountain blocks the shore. He paused for a moment wondering whether to turn back as the helmsman urged him. "Fortune helps the brave," he said, "Head for Pomponianus."

At Stabiae, on the other side of the bay formed by the gradually curving shore, Pomponianus had loaded up his ships even before the danger arrived, though it was visible and indeed extremely close, once it intensified. He planned to put out as soon as the contrary wind let up. That very wind carried my uncle right in, and he embraced the frightened man and gave him comfort and courage. In order to   lessen the other's fear by showing his own unconcern he asked to be taken to the baths. He bathed and dined, carefree or at least appearing so (which is equally impressive). Meanwhile, broad sheets of flame were lighting up many parts of Vesuvius; their light and brightness were the more vivid for the darkness of the night. To alleviate people's fears my uncle claimed that the flames came from the deserted homes of farmers who had left in a panic with the hearth fires still alight.

Then he rested, and gave every indication of actually sleeping; people who passed by his door heard his snores, which were rather resonant since he was a heavy man. The ground outside his room rose so high with the mixture of ash and stones that if he had spent any more time there escape would have been impossible. He got up and came out, restoring himself to Pomponianus and the others who had been unable to sleep. They discussed what to do, whether to remain under cover or to try the open air. The buildings were being rocked by a series of strong tremors, and appeared to have come loose from their foundations and to be sliding this way and that. Outside, however, there was danger from the rocks that were coming down, light and fire-consumed as these bits of pumice were. Weighing the relative dangers they chose the outdoors; in my uncle's case it was a rational decision, others just chose the alternative that frightened them the least.

They tied pillows on top of their heads as protection against the shower of rock. It was daylight now elsewhere in the world, but there the darkness was darker and thicker than any night. But they had torches and other lights. They decided to go down to the shore, to see from close up if anything was possible by sea. But it remained as rough and uncooperative as before. Resting in the shade of a sail he drank once or twice from the cold water he had asked for. Then came a smell of sulfur, announcing the flames, and the flames themselves, sending others into flight but reviving him. Supported by two small slaves he stood up, and immediately collapsed. As I understand it, his breathing was obstructed by the dust-laden air, and his innards, which were never strong and often blocked or upset, simply shut down. When daylight came again 2 days after he died, his body was found untouched, unharmed, in the clothing that he  had had on. He looked more asleep than dead.

Meanwhile at Misenum, my mother and I -- but this has nothing to do with history, and you only asked for information about his death. I'll stop here then. But I will say one more thing, namely, that I have written out everything that I did at the time and heard while memories were still fresh. You will use the important bits, for it is one thing to write a letter, another to write history, one thing to write to a friend, another to write for the public.

Farewell. 

More Kauffman tomorrow.