Volume 17, Number 10 · December 16, 1971
The Raw & The Cooked
By Francis Haskell
John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors
by Richard Ormond
Harper & Row, 264, 96 illustrations pp., $20.00
Gauguin's Paradise Lost
by Wayne Andersen, by Barbara Klein
Viking, 371, 138 illustrations pp., $12.50
As the nineteenth century drew to a close two restless and disappointed artists left Paris to investigate strange societies which had survived from a distant past, and which were to die out in a few years. John Singer Sargent began his regular visits to England in 1886 and before long he settled there as the principal painter of a group of blue-blooded and plutocratic clans whose way of life seems almost stranger to us today than that of the Tahitians who greeted Paul Gauguin when he first set foot in the South Sea islands in 1891. The pictures that resulted from the pilgrimages of the two artists are—however different in quality and approach—the fullest artistic records that we have of these societies, one in which the 'noble savage' was not yet a meaningless concept and the other in which the English rich still gloried ostentatiously in their wealth. Now that both savage and rich have been tamed into conformity these pictures have acquired an exoticism even greater than that with which their authors intentionally invested them.
Review, 3357 words
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