Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925 - painter John Singer Sargent

Another aspect of Sargent's personal history also likely magnified his distress at public opposition in 1919. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Sargent had decided, only partially successfully, to discard portraiture in favor of other artistic genres, largely because he was tired of subjects that talked back, that demanded revisions or adjustments of their features.(112) In addition to the opportunity to work in a more exalted aesthetic arena, the public library mural project promised Sargent complete discretion relative to subject and treatment. Unlike the living and present subjects of his portraits, the historical subjects of his murals were unable to object to his conception of them. But, to Sargent's chagrin, the shift in genre did not prevent the intrusion of "experts" with suggestions for improvement. Beginning shortly after the first installation, numerous Bostonians stepped forward to correct the artist in his representation of Western religious history. Especially eager were those specialists in biblical and ecclesiastical languages, who offered unsolicited, often condescending, advice on the murals' inscriptions.(113) The controversy over Synagogue, then, did not represent the first contentious engagement over the "accuracy" of parts of the cycle. On at least two different occasions, alterations in some of the inscriptions were rather rapidly executed.

Hind's notation that Sargent showed him books to demonstrate the validity of his historical sources underscores the gap between Sargent's perception of his working method and the argument of Synagogue's detractors. In order to guarantee the objectivity and authenticity of his narrative, Sargent conducted extensive research. He not only traveled widely to look at artistic and religious monuments firsthand, he also accumulated and consulted a large personal library of relevant books and materials. According to his younger contemporary, Boston artist R. H. Ives Gammell, the Sargent who painted Triumph of Religion was, first and foremost, the "cultivated reader," the scholar meticulously recording in his mural panels mental images elicited during hours of study in his private library.(114) The books that lined the shelves of the Boston Public Library presumably called to other serious readers' minds similar "pictures" of ancient and historically verifiable religious philosophies.

Religion clearly represented for Sargent an opportunity to explore the exotic, the elemental, the ultimate in human experience and imagination; filtered through Renan, it also, and just as important, offered the artist a scientific, archaeologically documentable, and fundamentally "objective" frame for his work. From Sargent's perspective, the soundness of his position had been recently underscored by discoveries in the "science" of racial anthropology and in the scholarship of biblical criticism. With the positivist Renan providing the overarching evolutionary narrative thread, Sargent turned to a wide range of literary and artistic sources as evidence of specific ideational moments in his story. In 1903 admiring critics reproved those who might have concluded that Sargent recommended Dogma of the Redemption as a model for contemporary practice or experience. On the contrary, "a modern man does not use archaic terms to express modern thoughts." The Christian south wall articulated historical ideas with the same degree of critical "detachment," the same "dispassionate spirit of the historian, scholar, and decorator" that Sargent had "exhibited in representing the cruel, treacherous, false gods of the primitive peoples."(115) This artist was an "onlooker" and not a devotee.(116) His cycle represented an abstract idea, the course of religious thought, not a confession of personal belief. "The thoughts here summoned up," Russell Sturgis claimed of the Christian subjects installed in 1903, "are not the exclusive property of the devout, of believers, even of the religiously inclined."(117)