Word: sargent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sargent resolved to put the English Channel between himself and his detractors. He took an ornate studio on London's Tite Street, later installed his wid owed mother and unmarried sister in a flat around the corner. To be "done by Sargent" became the posh thing; celebrities flocked to his studio. But instead of immortalizing, he rather paralyzed most of them, turning them into clotheshorses, handsome or beautiful as the case might be. having elegant gestures and bored, sleepy expressions...
...Sargent seemed to be coasting on the crest of the wave; yet in a way, he was trapped by his own success. Francis Taylor, who once visited Sargent, remembers him as "a thoroughly tamed and domesticated animal, who lived only for his painting and for no other purpose...
With age the animal grew fat, and kicked. "Portrait painting," he would burst out, "is a pimp's profession." He amused himself increasingly with watercolor landscapes, to which he gave a wet, soft and unconvincing glisten. .During World War I, Sargent sketched and painted at the front-an act of courage and enterprise which nevertheless achieved little. He had visited the U.S. on occasion, and never relinquished his U.S. citizenship. Toward the end he accepted a corn-mission to design murals for the rotunda and entrance hall of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which he hoped would...
Down from the Attic. Soon begrimed, and lighted only by 100-watt bulbs, Sargent's murals have long escaped the attention of most Boston Museum visitors...
Apparently, Rathbone felt that the time to decide whether Sargent was more than a maker of period pieces has not yet arrived. "While his star appears to be rising again," Rathbone wrote in the exhibition catalogue, "critical opinion is not yet willing ... to admit that he is the artistic peer of his now more securely established American contemporaries-Homer, Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Ryder and Whistler...