“Value” or “quality” ae the same word that describes art and also real life and can be applied to John Singer Sargent paintings. When the term means “comparative”, Sargent’s work is not of the very, very best, but if the term means “distinctive”, then Sargent accomplishes greatness.
John Singer Sargent uses the word “value” in a number of different ways as do we all. His paintings have value because they can sell for money at a high price. His paintings have value because of their artfulness and significance. Value also is a word that applies to the ton or shade of a color. Value also means moral weight, and we can wonder whether Sargent’s paintings are edifying enough to make the Great Beauties of his time as moral exemplars rather than ornaments, though we do treat movie stars as role models regardless of their morality.
There are a number of meanings for the term “value” somewhat parallel to those which are part of the general vocabulary. The word can mean a moral ideal or necessity, like individualism or law and order whereby the term is treated as axiomatic and so the logical basis of all that follows in behavior and belief. It can mean useful, as when it is said that a tractor is useful, and so of value. And it can be treated, as economists will, as a measure of comparative exchange so that value is a matter of more or less even if the measurement itself, money, can change over time, as happens in inflation or reevaluations because it is necessary to find some basis on which to turn value into a single commodity that is comparative, as when people say it is just to kill murderers so as to think that one event has some equivalence with another.
There is a different way to think of value by looking at the entire situation rather than reducing it to a single measure, just as happens when thinking about a doctors income as not just his various income streams that are accumulated, some money as a salary for working at a hospital and another stream from a grant and another for fees from a private practice, but just as the occasions that contribute to him but result from his situation as a successful professional where multiple and mutable financial streams ensue. The situation is more real than the financial streams however much is accumulated in the bank balance.
John Singer (American, 1856–1925), Life Study (Study of an Egyptian Girl), 1891. Oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago
Apply that to Sargent’s view of the Gilded Age. Look at the whole package rather than the quantification of qualities. A good baseline comparison is “Nude Egyptian Girl”, from 1881, when he was still doing the big commissions that made his reputation. Don’t look at the painting about an exotic, someone out of National Geographic for showing nude aborigines, or as part of colonialism, North Africa where people in the nude were different from clothed Europeans; Look at the portrait herself. She has a very nice color, not quite bronze, but not white either, and her skin is not mottled or disfigured. She is also slim and so undercuts the idea that people in a different civilization will be overweight because of bad nutrition. She is set at an angle, as twisting, and so only part of her pretty face is visible, and her waist shows no flab , the most striking part of her figure being het behind, because she is twisted so as to make one cheek more prominent than another, a viewer shifting from that to her rather regal face, much like those in the more famous portraits of elegant Europeans, and that on display without the uniform of clothing to provide her with her dignity. She is what she is as a presence.
John Singer Sargent, Isabel Valle Austen, 1882. Oil on canvas, private collection.
Now compare the Egyptian nude to “Isabel Valle”, from 1882, who is also intriguing and mysterious but presents a very different package. She is a European woman who is almost facing front, a light tilt to her face, dressed in a very becoming and bright white dress. The force of her attention is her face, not her backside, and that reveals what is most important to her, western women to be noted for their unadorned faces and well clothed bodies while Arab women cover their faces in a kind of modesty for which Western women dispense, that saying a lot about their putative equality however dependant they are in money given to them by husbands and losing their original names. Her clothes are attractive, even alluring but they accomplish that by distorting their figures, the shoulders padded, the busts accentuated and their behinds covered with shapes that distort them with bustles a generation before Sargent or in his time just give behind no notice. The fashion is not a uniform because it does not signify rank. It only is a design, a fashion, hung upon it and so changing over time as a body shape while real women have or had not changed in four thousand years or as long as there has been memory of them. So there is a tension between Valle’s body and dress and that disparity persists for the civilized West, sometimes breasts flattened or pronounced and legs hidden or largely shown, Sargent’s time when bodies are well covered but their bodies struggling with their clothes so as to hide what should be hidden. So the whole package of a Western woman is an assemblage of the state of a face and its often regal self assured pose and fashionable attire and a posture of significance along with the money required to equip a woman with her attire and manner, the last the result of long years of development that the Egyptian girl is found to come or made into being by Sargent as her “natural” pose. The value, in the sense of significances, of each of these two images created by Sargent, is not the price of the sale of the portraits, or the expense and upkeep of their styles of life, but in the assembled set of properties, these in conflict and in harmony within each and distinct from one another. What is created is a way of being, and so autonomous, for its own sakes, and so not translatable into a single measure.
Here is another of Sargent’s portraits that can be said to have value, which means in this case of some meaning or significance. There are three values that a portraitist has to deal with. First, there is their appearance, given off in dress and posture. Sargent is very good at that, exhibiting how a woman is placed in the world. Second, there is the physical body, especially the face, and Sargent is very good at that as well, the great beauties stately but also revealing that there are bodies beneath the clothes and that the faces are distinctive presences each with its own shape and impression so that Ms. Inches seems more demure and Mrs. Swinton more flashy. But there is a third element of portraiture, which tries to connect the mind behind the face to the face itself so as to penetrate into a subject’s mind despite the obvious fact that looks are accidental while minds communicate with words and so inevitably are disjointed from faces. Minds a mystery. Only the greatest of portraitists can seem to overcome that barrier. Leonardo, Valesquez, Vermeer and especially Rembrandt do seem to accomplish portraying the souls of people, though a favorite of mine is which shows a grandparent lovingly looking at a small grandson, that is the focus of his being, so my sentimentality tells me. Sargent, however, does not come into the front rank because he does not blend interiority with exteriority, all his portraits however distinctive not plunging the depths. Lady Agnew is poised and ironic but does not reveal her inner feelings. However metaphysically difficult it ever is to accomplish that. That is a very high mark which I think Sargent just misses and for reasons that are beyond me. Sargent is unjustly criticized as merely a “society” portraitist because he becomes just a bit short of the greatest.
John Singer Sargent, Gertrude Vernon, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892. Oil on canvas.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Charles E. Inches (Louise Pomeroy), 1887. Oil on canvas.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. George Swinton (Elizabeth Ebsworth), 1897. Oil on canvas.
But, on the other hand, the judgment of quality or value, whereby one painting or novel is better or worse than another, is a matter of taste, which means, according to Hume, posing an assertion and getting persuasive evidence on the basis of indications of rock bed reality, as has happened in literature since Samuel Johnson, however much more recent literary critics like Northrope Frye, offer an objective description of reality, as in his typology of literature, meant to be conclusive rather than speculative, Bernard Berenson as an art critic evaluating worth or value in dollars concerning pre-Renausance paintings and Meyer Schapiro insisting on intrinsic worth through an objective eye assembling evidence, Looked at this way, the act of art criticism as a matter of taste, there are a number of Sargent paintings which can qualify as distinguished enough to be considered great rather than of limited quality even if not to measure up to, let us say, Manet’s “Bargirl at the Follies Bergeat”. Here are three of these abundant very high quality Sargent paintings.
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Constance Gladys, Countess de Grey, later Marchioness of Ripon, c. 1904. Oil on canvas.
Sargent’s “Constance Gladys” is worth remarking upon because she is what she is despite the usual affectations of a high society lady. She has thin lips and a condescending smile. She has an aquiline nose so as to make herself a snob. She has a friendly demeanor that remains aloof. She has simple pearls but a deep decolletage that is not inappropriate and a very carefully composed coif. She is therefore what she seems to be but to a viewer she seems deep down to be nothing more than she seems to be, which is deeply superficial, made up just of her appearances while Lady Agnew exudes her inside, her separation from the world, so as to convey her presence is an illusion while “Constance Gladys” is only that illusion and so a state of being in itself. That is a trick of sorts but the only attribute that makes her admirable, she is an ordinary version of a stately beauty old enough to fit into her role comfortably, even seamlessly. Maybe her life was more interesting, having twice married into nobility but she seems to be what she always was, a critique of the whole genre, and so a bit of a spoof.
John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Edmund Kelly, 1889. Oil on canvas.
A less ironic and more interesting and engaging figure is portrayed by Sargent of “Mrs. Edmund Kelly”. She is not very pretty, her thin lipped and aquiline nose are standard gear and her eyes are tiny and her cheeks high without being ennobling. She has a nondescript hairdo and a white dress that covers her neck. Her small boned stature and small face make her seem fragile. She wears no jewelry but a simple wedding band. It is easy enough to see her as having a story. Maybe she is sickly or otherwise traumatized, not happy to be facing the world, even looking at the portraitist as a burden. So the viewer imputes internality even if she does not present herself as striking, and so the inferences about her make her memorable if not appealing.
Circle of John Singer Sargent, Portrait of a Lady titled Absorta. Oil on canvas, no year recorded. Formerly attributed to Sargent; now attributed to Mariano Fortuny Madrazo.
A Sargent painting whose internality comes from the portrait rather than for the story told about her is “Absorta” which portrays a woman a bit plump and unlined and with a smooth skin from forehead to chest, her skin unadorned with jewelry and ending with the top of a glove that reaches well above her arm. ("Absorta" is said to be in the circle of Sargent, which just shows that Sargent's style is so distinctive that it earns emulation.) Like many Sargents, she seems composed but a bit twinkly in the eye and a characteristic demure smile. Her presence is in her difference, which is neither plain or stunning, and so engages what her beauty or her enigma might be, the presumption being that women are an enigma, while men, even when Sargent portrays them as nude or sexual, are not. Men get undressed so as to get to business while women are a continuous dressing and undressing or bare from head to upper chest and so partially clothed when they are dressed up and appealing for that reason while men in the street or the salon are totally dressed. A bit of a mystery or at least something very deep whatever it is. So these three portraits display the asymmetries between the sexes, each with their either necessary or just conventional customs, and so place Sargent’s paintings into an existential rather than just a social setting and so profound even if also accessible..
Quality means very different meanings in the humanities and in the sciences. In the humanities, it means what is distinctive or singular, as we invoke the phrase of a distinctive quality. History is about how an era or a President or a war has its own characteristics however many things also repeat themselves. People die in all wars but the state of armament and the issues at stake in a particular war give it its cast or bva;lue. Quality in science has to do with amounts on a measure. What elements combine to make a compound? There are a finite number of ingredients and so the measure is not based on a linear model but a combinatory one. There are kinds of wars and one or another fits in as a border war or a world war until a new kind of war has to be developed or rediscovered, such as a genocidal one. Is the Israel Hamas War a new kind, or an old kind, of one with few examples? Quality means kind., which is a characteristic turned into a variable, so that people are more or less angry and that there are so many sands in an hourglass or how many degrees in an angle.
The same idea of humanistic quality can be applied to Sargent paintings. What is of high quality is that each of them are distinctive, that more important than what is generic, each one of them showing a person sticking their face and posture and dress into the world and each conveying its own tone and texture, a world on itself, to use that metaphor. That value of distinctiveness as an end in itself, just as Austen novels each different on a different principle and so Emma is a cheery meddler while Ann Eliott is an introspective worrier despite all living in Regency countryside is a principle of orientation and value as when one offers that Tissot’s beauties look alike while Sargent’s do not, and that contribute to making Sargent valuable because of that in all the manifold meanings of value: which means better and also significant and well done.