The Nose Of The Master
Michael Gorra writes: ‘For Henry James’s seventieth birthday in 1913 a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint him; and Sargent’s own birthday gift was to waive his fee. The novelist sat some ten times in the artist’s London studio, and the painter always asked him to bring some friends along—“animated, sympathetic, beautiful, talkative friends,†as James put it, whose conversation would break the “gloom in my countenance by their prattle.†That was Sargent’s usual practice, and the evidence of its success sits this summer at “Henry James and American Painting,†a compact but wonderfully heterogeneous show at the Morgan Library.”
