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Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925 - painter John Singer Sargent
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1997 by Sally M. Promey
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is best known today as a painter of society portraits. In 1890, however, he embraced the opportunity to prove himself at mural decoration, a genre he and his contemporaries judged superior to portraiture.(1) Sargent's first and most complex mural program, Triumph of Religion (1890-1919), is one of the more elaborate cycles of religions art produced by an American artist. Its subject matter notwithstanding, Triumph of Religion does not adorn the precincts of a church or cathedral. It occupies, instead, the third-floor special collections hall of the public library on Copley square in Boston, Massachusetts. For this space, Sargent painted his history of religion as an analogue for enlightened human achievement.
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The seriousness with which both Sargent and a large public approached this high cultural celebration of the progress of Western civilization is well documented.(2) The artist devoted a significant part of three decades of his life to the commission. Nevertheless, in terms of art historical consideration, the library murals, unlike Sargent's portraits and watercolors, have not emerged from a habit of neglect that began almost immediately alter the artist died. This article reconstructs the painter's declared intentions for his decoration, clarifies the project's narrative design, anchors the reception of the work in relation to contemporary politics of religion and race, and accounts for the state of the murals at the time of Sargent's death.(3)
Contrary to popular and critical descriptions treating the cycle as though the artist had completed the scheme to his satisfaction, Sargent never did, in fact, paint the final panel, the composition he called the keynote of the hall. This mural, depicting the Sermon on the Mount, would have constituted the "Triumph" proclaimed in the title Sargent selected. Without the capstone the separate parts of the cycle resisted convergence in style and narrative concept.(4) While a number of historians have remarked on the change in the artist's plan for the concluding staircase wall, few have considered the cycle's thematic structure and literary source or the factors that interrupted the intended sequence.(5) And no one has charted the dramatic manner in which the change truncated Sargent's program, redirecting its narrative energies and introducing new readings that stood in marked contrast to the idea Sargent proposed.
Description of the Cycle
In May 1890,(6) Sargent and the trustees of the new Boston Public Library [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] reached a verbal agreement on the mural decoration for the gallery of the special collections floor at the top of the library's principal staircase.(7) Charles Follen McKim, the building's chief architect, and Stanford White, one of his partners in the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White, had both personally campaigned for Sargent's selection as muralist.(8) Expatriate American painter Edwin Austin Abbey, Sargent's friend and colleague, undertook the decoration of the delivery room on the second floor, and the French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes consented to provide murals for the walls of the grand staircase and the second-floor corridor.(9) The space designated for Sargent's work was a long vaulted hall with no windows on the library's uppermost floor [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Skylights in the barrel vault illuminated the room, which measured 85 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 26 feet high at the peak of the vault. Along the east wall ran the balustraded stairwell; doors leading to special collections rooms punctuated the two end walls to the north and south and the west wall opposite the stairwell. Sargent would assume responsibility for decorating the entire third-floor gallery. He could thus treat the space as a unified artistic whole; he could manipulate to his liking a relatively self-contained visual environment.(10)
The library's trustees left the subject matter of the murals to the discretion of the artist. Initially, Sargent intended to depict themes from Spanish literature. By mid-November 1890 he had changed his mind and selected instead a subject from the history of religion.(11) In official correspondence with the library he called the cycle "Triumph of Religion - a mural decoration illustrating certain stages of Jewish and Christian religious history."(12) As the project developed, Sargent's murals would require installation in four parts, spanning a period of twenty-four years, from 1895 to 1919. The fully projected scheme [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED] was far grander and more complex than anything the artist attempted in subsequent mural commissions. As Sargent noted in 1914 to Josiah Benton, president of the library's board of trustees, the decorative task was also a more demanding challenge than inexperience in the field had led him to anticipate.(13) Over the course of the project, Sargent painted all of the panels on canvas in England, accompanying them, after completion, to the United States to orchestrate and supervise their placement.
