Henry James by John Singer Sargent

In 1887, the great novelist Henry James wrote about his friend and fellow American expatriate the artist John Singer Sargent, in Harper’s Magazine:

In an altogether exceptional degree does he gives us the sense that an intention and the art of carrying it out are for him one and the same thing… that perception with him is already by itself a kind of execution…. 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, elevates and humanizes the technical problem.

This is high praise but well deserved in my judgement. What James saw in Singer Sargent’s work was his gift, not just for capturing a likeness so apparently effortlessly, but also for the aura of immediacy that his portraits emanate. His perception of the character of the figure in front of him was so coterminous with the act of laying down paint on canvas, that the result is, for the viewer, a sense that we can feel both the sitter and the artist’s actu

John Singer Sargent, Henry James, 1913. Oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, London

al presence. As James acknowledges in his article, not since Velázquez has an artist created painted works with such auratic narrative qualities. Like the Spanish master’s, they are infused by what Walter Benjamin, writing about art more generally, would later describe as ‘aesthetic authority’ …a… ‘halo or preciousness’ that we recognise as profoundly authentic.

The article was written when James himself was forty-four and Sargent 31. James had already published some of his most famous novels, including The Europeans (1878), Washington Square (1880) The Portrait of a Lady (1881) The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima (1885-6). Sargent too was enjoying success and a degree of notoriety. His portrait Madame X (1883) had caused scandalised controversy in Victorian society over its subject’s drooping shoulder strap (later repainted without the deliberately provocative wardrobe malfunction, to allay the outrage), while El Jaleo (1882), Dr Pozzi at Home (1881) and the artist’s most obviously Velázquez-inspired society portrait, Lady with the Rose (1882) were gems from what would eventually amount to more than 900 works in his lifetime’s oeuvre.

John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1883-4, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

John Singer Sargent, Lady with the Rose, 1882, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

However, by the time this portrait of James was made in 1913 in pre-WWI London, the author was seventy (it was commissioned by his friends and supporters to celebrate his birthday) and had just another two years to live, while the painter was fifty-seven. James had known more success since he authored his article all those years ago, but also a degree of critical failure when his play Guy Domville was booed in 1895 and he was compared to the period’s leading theatrical light, Oscar Wilde before his fall from grace, and found wanting. Sargent not only understands James’ intellect and exquisite discernment but also discerns the weight of his life experience with all its many highs and lows, triumphs, and disappointments.

Clearly not one to abstain from the dining options to be enjoyed at The Reform Club, where he rented rooms for ten years up until 1913, a portly James has here been posed by Sargent with the dome of his pate illuminated from above. It shines out as if the artist wished to draw attention to the labyrinthine thoughts and feelings at play within the writer’s mind, ideas to which he gave such nuanced and multi-faceted psychological expression in his writings. Sargent’s portrait suggests that James’ brain remains actively engaged but the eyes are tired and careworn. The theatricality of the spotlighting also picks out his white shirt collar and his left hand, with thumb hitched into waistcoat and signet ring glinting. The background is cast into sombre darkness, save for a traditional-looking wood panelled door and brass hinge shown at top left where the artist’s signature also appears.

If you weren’t aware of the sitter’s life story and authorial reputation, you might imagine that the picture depicts some elderly banker or a well-upholstered and self-satisfied captain of industry. He is dressed formally, in a black flannel jacket or morning coat and chalk-striped waistcoat from which a gold watch chain dangles across his ample belly. The stiff wing collar is high, and its opening reveals the sagging jowls of age and overindulgence while the bow tie betokens upper middle-class complacency and entitlement. At first glance, the pose seems assured and haughty, daring anyone to challenge the privileges that his rank endows.

But look again and you can read vulnerability in that expression and in the words about to be spoken from those slightly parted lips. That harsh light is unflattering, uncomfortably revealing. James is clean-shaven, as had become the fashion by 1913, when beards and moustaches had come to seem old-fashioned and unrefined. But there remains no hiding place for this subject under that glare. What little remains of the hair is slightly mussed on one side, and the angle of the head more questioning than confrontational. In an article by Colm Tóibín, the Irish novelist wrote about James’ closeted sexuality and the strenuous efforts that his family went to after his death to excise any suggestions in his ‘ardent’ letters to young men that might be ‘misinterpreted’, in their blinkered view, and do damage to his posthumous reputation. This made me think about what to me looks like the insecurity that Sargent has perceived and captured. James is attired as a picture of priggish and formidable respectability, but the artist has knowingly or unwittingly, painted his subject as a study of what today we would call imposter syndrome. At the same time, however much at ease or not James was in his ‘costume’ of grave decorum, his gaze back at us also speaks of his fine appraising judgement. That look is penetrating, and a little intimidating in what it reads of our own psychological hang-ups and complexities, to the extent that it can feel uncomfortable to be looked at so sagaciously. Sargent’s genius lies in the depiction of competing emotions that play across his subject’s face.

The portrait became the target for the suffragette Mary Wood who in 1914 slashed at it with a meat cleaver as part of the protest movement aimed at achieving votes for women. It seems that the painting, then hanging in The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, was seen as an embodiment of establishment conservatism and chauvinism rather than the more subtle depiction of the suffocatingly cloistered existence and sensitivity outlined above. Ironically, the attack on the highly valued artwork was enacted as a gesture against inequality and in favour of political freedom but the symbolic ‘casualties’, Sargent and James, were artists who, however much confined to depictions of the rich and well-connected, were both unmarried men with a profound empathy and compassion for the women they portrayed. 

The knowledge that Sargent was happy to forgo his fee for this portrait commission tells us that the painting of it for him represented not a mere transaction but was rather a way of paying homage from one master to another, while expressing his gratitude, his fellow-feeling and his appreciation of him too. James recognised the importance of the portrait by bequeathing it to The National Portrait Gallery in his will. Clearly there existed a degree of hubris in this gesture, but more importantly also genuine admiration for the artistry, compassion, and friendship of the painter.