Portraits by an Artist in His Prime

If there’s a single artist whose work connects the Huntington’s collections of British and American art, it must be John Singer Sargent. An American, born to expatriates in Florence in 1856, he studied in Florence and Paris, and achieved enormous success in London as a portrait painter in the aristocratic style known as the Grand Manner. By 1900, Sargent was the leading society portraitist on both sides of the Atlantic, but he is so strongly identified with British portraiture, he is often thought to be British.

That means that he fits right in at the Huntington. The multifaceted Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino--founded by American railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington--has many claims to fame, but it is best known in art circles for its British art collection and is probably the world’s finest repository of full-length British portraits, most notably “Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough and “Pinkie” by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

American art is a relative newcomer at the Huntington, which opened a gallery in 1984 to house an American collection donated by the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. And, until very recently, the collection contained only one Sargent portrait, an informal, half-length painting of the artist’s friend, Charles Stuart Forbes. It was presented to the Huntington by the foundation in honor of the gallery’s inauguration.

But now the Scott gallery has a minibonanza of Sargents. His painting of Forbes has been joined by “Portrait of Mrs. William Playfair,” a three-quarter-length likeness of a middle-aged woman, recently purchased with funds from the Scott foundation, and three long-term loans from private collections. Most spectacular--and installed in a central place of honor--is “Portrait of Pauline Astor,” a more-than 8-foot-tall, full-length portrayal of a young woman in a landscape. Flanking her, well above eye level, are two relatively small roundels (round paintings) depicting mythological subjects, “Sphinx and Chimaera” and “Judgment of Paris,” created as studies for murals at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

Amy Meyers, the Huntington’s curator of American art couldn’t be happier. “The luxury of this is that we are able to show Sargent working at his highest caliber in very different periods of his career,” she said. “ ‘Mrs. Playfair’ was painted when he was in his early 30s, relatively fresh from Paris and still painting very much in a Parisian mode, looking toward continental sources. He was deeply influenced by the Impressionists but also looking back to Old Master painting, particularly that of Velasquez.

“When you come to the Grand Manner portraits he was doing 10 years later, such as ‘Pauline Astor,’ what you are seeing is a wonderful interweaving--in a very self-conscious way--of the impact of Impressionism on Sargent as he reworked the Grand Manner tradition. So you have this marvelous marriage of the loose, very fluid translucent brush strokes of Gainsborough reinterpreted by Sargent in terms of Impressionism,” she said.

“The roundels represent his mural paintings, which of course come much later and are done in America, and are really the working out of great public projects in a Beaux-Arts fashion. They are civic works on a very different scale.”

How all these Sargents happened to congregate in San Marino is a curious, convoluted story. Fulfilling a longstanding wish to acquire another Sargent, the Huntington used Scott foundation funds to purchase “Mrs. Playfair” in March for an undisclosed sum from New York collectors Harry and Cookie Spiro, Meyers said. But while that deal was in the works and Meyers was scouring the market for suitable contenders, several major works by Sargent came up for sale at Sotheby’s New York. The cover piece on the auction catalog was “Portrait of Pauline Astor.”

“The image was unforgettable because it was so striking,” Meyers said. But the painting, consigned by a descendant of the subject, was sold to Houston collector William Carloss Morris for $1.9 million. It was the sixth highest price in the Dec. 3, 1997 auction, in which another Sargent painting, “In the Garden, Corfu,” brought the top price of $8.3 million.

Meyers had never met Morris and had no reason to think she would ever be associated with “Pauline Astor.” But shortly after the Huntington had acquired “Mrs. Playfair,” Morris called the museum and was connected to her.

“As a private collector, he was very interested in researching his own paintings,” she said. “He had made the equation between Gainsborough and this particular portrait. Although he had never visited the Huntington, he found that we have the greatest collection of English Grand Manner portraits in this country and called to find out more about the collection. He was particularly interested in connections between the painting and ‘Blue Boy’ for a variety of reasons.”

One significant link is that William Astor--an American living in England who was the father of Pauline and commissioned her portrait after his wife died and his daughter became mistress of his household--purchased the estate of Cliveden from the Duke of Westminister, the family that owned “Blue Boy” before Henry Huntington acquired it. Morris delights in pointing out other similarities between the two paintings as well. Both Pauline Astor and Jonathan Buttall, the subject of “Blue Boy,” were 18 when they were painted, he said. And X-rays have revealed that Gainsborough originally portrayed Buttall with an English water spaniel--similar to the dog in the Astor portrait.

As the conversation between the collector and the curator continued, Morris “just baldly said, ‘Would you be interested in having the painting on loan?’ ” Meyers said. “And I baldly answered, ‘Indeed we would.’ And things moved from there.

“The painting is obviously incredibly suited to our collection. We have wonderful colonial paintings and early American paintings that tie the American and British collections together very closely. But we had always wanted a great portrait in the Grand Manner tradition that would [address] the cross-cultural affiliations that are cultivated through the course of American and British art history. This painting--in its clear references to Gainsborough and as a great example of Sargent’s work in the 1890s, when he became one of the most popular and sought-after and successful portraitists of those in high social rank in London circles--is really the perfect work to link our two collections.”

The background of “Portrait of Pauline Astor” is not entirely clear. “We don’t know whether Sargent was trying to raise this American family to the stature of those who owned Grand Manner portraits as they were buying great estates like Cliveden, or whether the Astors themselves were making equations between their family and those who owned paintings of this sort,” Meyers said.

However, his portrayal of a young woman who has taken on a new responsibility is very successful, she said. “Sargent, being much more than a society painter, was always interested in character study. This young woman is placed in this wonderfully rich autumnal landscape. Her beautiful spaniel is pulling at her dress, but even though she is there in all of her youthful prime and beauty, she resists looking down. She looks out with enormous strength. A glimmer of a smile plays at her lips, but the sober expression in her eyes plays against the landscape that’s passing from summer into fall. It’s that tension that makes this such a powerful painting.”

Once the loan of “Pauline Astor” had been agreed upon, Meyers returned to the Spiros and asked them to loan the two roundels, “to show Sargent in as many modes as possible,” she said. “Now we have this broad spectrum of Sargent’s works that tie our collections together in a marvelous way, so we are very lucky and very grateful.”

This region’s riches in Sargent’s work also extend to two other museums: “Dr. Pozzi at Home” is in the collection of the UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art owns “Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis.”

The Huntington’s Sargents will be on view until October, when the Scott gallery will be temporarily closed. “We’ll reopen to gloriously fresh galleries and a slightly cleaned ‘Pauline Astor,’ ” Meyers said. “This painting is virtually untouched. It is in beautiful shape and just needs a light, surface cleaning, so that will take place in the fall.”

The loan of “Pauline Astor” is open-ended, Meyers said. Although it has been set up as a long-term arrangement, “the vicissitudes of the lives of a family are hard to predict, so one has to remain as flexible as possible, as with all works that come from private collections. The way I think of it is that, in the short term, it makes the richest of summer exhibitions; in the long term, it would be the healthiest of marriages. So we will hope for the long term and be happy for the short term.”

* Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, [626] 405-2141. Tuesdays to Sundays, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. $8.50 adults, $7 seniors, $5 students, free for children under 12.