The Artistic Masterpiece Dearest to Me

You perplexed me when you asked me what artistic masterpiece is dearest to me, and then wished to know why it is the dearest — as though you had asked me to pick out one alone. To be frank with you and true to myself, I confess that I have never settled my affection upon any one picture, holding it the model of artistic perfection, hanging a copy of it at the head of the reception room and pampering it within a gilded frame; rather I have let my heart wander as far as I could between this one and that, across the different schools and the famous artists. Nor will I deny to you that I often relish a picture by some unknown above all others by the geniuses of art, following my own taste and casting many a consideration to the winds.

If I were given the choice of picking one, and my ambition were money, I would select, for instance, Raphael's famous masterpiece, the 'Madonna of San Sisto,' or da Vinci's masterpiece, the 'Mona Lisa' — with all my aversion to the latter, for all its present majesty. If I were given the choice of a picture to bring back to me the memories of childhood, I would choose Munkácsy's masterpiece 'Christ before Pilate,' upon which I first opened my eyes in the parlor of my father's house, or, like it, the picture of the Angelus — 'the evening bell' — by Millet. Or if I were to choose a picture to boast of in company, I would pick one of the pieces of Rembrandt, say, or Gainsborough, or Van Gogh. But none of these is the picture in which my mind finds complete rest.

To reach a decisive answer I must follow a pruning method. So I begin with everything ancient, whether on rock or cave wall or temple dome, for history, and the road art traveled before arriving at what it now is, do not greatly concern me. Nor am I captivated by the grandeur and perfection of the Italian masterpieces that adorn the churches, or the pictures and canvases treasured up in the museums of Italy, before which thousands bow their heads every day. And I except from what I love — with all my esteem and reverence — everything produced by the schools of Spain, Holland, and Belgium, even the French school, which still swings between bewitching beauty and naked truth, though it has attained a large share of both. Then I pass by the British school of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the passing of an admiring spectator, and I reach the modern age with its artistic doctrines and tendencies that aim at shaking off the bonds of tradition and so rush to the farthest limits of exaggeration and recklessness.

The school from which I choose my masterpiece, then, is the temperate universal school, which is ascribed to no age or country or doctrine, but is that in which the paths of art in the past came together, and from which descend the styles and theories of the present and the future — the impressionist (impressionism), the abstract (abstract), the cubist (cubism), the symbolist (symbolism), and the rest, down to philosophies that often end in sophistry. Nor does possession concern me so much as creation: the picture I choose is the one I wish I myself had painted with my own brush. On this basis I seldom wish that the masterpieces of Michelangelo and Van Dyck, or the inventions of Picasso and Braque, had been of my own production. Nor do I regard the subject as essential, though in general I prefer portraits of persons, then natural scenes, then flowers and still life, then sentimental and narrative subjects, among them the historical.

My masterpiece is this one which appears on the opposite page, and which, whenever I search my memory and turn over the books of art, arrests my eye, opening in my soul a readiness to sharpen my helpless brush. The painter, John Sargent, of American origin, was born in Italy, studied in France, and worked all his life in England, so that past and future seem to meet in his canvases; for he attained a classical style free of any stiffness or banality, and knew the dividing line between tradition and emancipation. He lived at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one; he never married, but directed all his genius to the cultivation and refinement of his art until he reached in it an ease untainted by affectation or strain. This picture of his — Mrs. Mathias — like all his pictures that I have known in their original canvases, is free of kneading and forcing and trickery and the throwing on of pigments without restraint or reckoning. The colors in it are laid with mastery, with a steady hand and in a direct manner, with a broad, fitting brush; so that he seems never to stumble over the means in expressing his feeling. He

caught his subject in a passing moment of gaiety, and no material obstacle hindered him from attaining his end. The picture lacks nothing of balance in composition, in the distribution of shadow and light, and in the proportion of surfaces and lines; everything there centers upon a beautiful head that glitters like a jewel above a dark blue caftan melting into a heaven of warm black.

And so the candor and the eloquence with which Sargent chose to express what stirred within him are some of the reasons that have made this picture of his one of the artistic masterpieces dearest to me.