THE WERTHEIMER PORTRAITS
BY ROGER FRY
I WENT to see the Wertheimer portraits now on view at the National Gallery with some trepidation. I remembered so well seeing them as they appeared year by year on the walls of the Royal Academy. I remembered the chorus of praise with which my fellow-critics greeted them. I remembered some of the acid and disobliging phrases with which, in my youthful fanaticism, I had denounced them, and I wondered whether, when once they were enshrined in the National Gallery, I should be compelled in honesty to say that I had failed to recognize a great master in the dawn of his triumph or whether I should find myself once more a solitary Devil's Advocate. Either alternative seemed to me disagreeable. However, the sight of them relieved me of apprehension. I saw that I had been both right and wrong, and I saw that the dispute between my fellow-critics and myself arose from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the words we used. I felt then that what I had said was substantially true; that when I said that Mr Sargent was "our greatest practitioner in paint" I had very nearly hit the mark. But if I had been right from a purely aesthetic standpoint I had none the less been wrong in pedantically insisting on that in exhibitions of what ought to be regarded as an applied art. I had used "practitioner in paint" as a term of abuse, comparing it with the honourable title of artist. I had failed to see that just as there is need both for pure and applied science so there is need for both pure and applied art, and that the art of Mr Sargent is eminently and entirely of the latter kind. It is art applied to social requirements and social ambitions. I see now that this marvellous series of portraits represents a social transaction quite analogous to the transactions between a man and his lawyer. A rich man has need of a lawyer's professional skill to enable him to secure the transmission of his wealth to posterity, and a rich man, if he have the intelligence of Sir Asher Wertheimer and the luck to meet a Sargent, can, by the latter's professional skill, transmit his fame to posterity.
And as we must suppose that it is in the interests of society that
