Sargent's woman in white
THIS IS John Singer Sargent's 1880 oil painting, Fumée d'Ambre Gris (Smoke of Ambergris), a work that began with some sketches he made while traveling in Morocco when he was 24 and was completed in Paris the following year. The picture is owned by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which is where I first saw it many years ago. I was smitten at first sight, and it remains to this day one of my all-time favorite paintings.
The figure in Fumée is burning ambergris, a waxy substance formed in the intestines of the sperm whale. It has an aroma similar to musk and was long sought after for its use in creating perfumes and fragrances. It was also added to exotic foods, burned as incense, incorporated into medicines, and regarded as an aphrodisiac. The serene and dignified woman painted by Sargent is burning ambergris in a brazier and inhaling the rising fumes. She spreads her veil to form a sort of tent around her head, the better to concentrate the exhilarating smoke as she breathes it in. Or perhaps she wants to ensure that some of the scent will be absorbed by her robes, so that she'll continue to be enveloped in its enticing muskiness.
I love everything about this painting: its exotic stillness, its captivating elegance, its quiet sensuality. I am struck by how much Sargent was able to do with so little color. Even to my untrained eye — I don't know how to paint or draw, and have never formally studied art — the lustrous execution of so many shades of white shows what genius Sargent brought to his work.
His friend Henry James thought so, too. "The charming, dusky, white-robed person," James wrote in a lengthy appreciation of Sargent's work for Harper's magazine in 1887,
stands on a rug, under a great white Moorish arch, and from out of the shadows of the large drapery, raised pentwise by her hands, which covers her head, looks down, with painted eyes and brows showing above a bandaged mouth, at the fumes of a beautiful censer or chafing-dish placed on the carpet. I know not who this stately Mohammedan may be, nor in what mysterious domestic or religious rite she may be engaged; but in her muffled contemplation and her pearl-colored robes, under her plastered arcade, which shines in the Eastern light, she is beautiful and memorable. The picture is exquisite, a radiant effect of white upon white. . . .
Fumée d'Ambre Gris is not Sargent's most renowned or beloved painting — that would probably be Portrait of Madame X, which he considered "the best thing I have ever done" and which hangs at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other popular contenders for the title of Sargent's greatest work would include El Jaleo , his painting of a whirling Spanish dancer, which is at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or his mysterious and arresting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, one of the must-see treasures at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
For me, though, the Moroccan vision in white surpasses all the others. Little to nothing is known about the woman in the painting. But through his art Sargent made her immortal, and bequeathed to the world an image no less intoxicating than the fumes of ambergris she inhaled with such tranquility on the day a young American artist was there to capture the scene.
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The last line
"The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned." — H. G. Wells The Time Machine (1895)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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