'Menconi + Schoelkopf is a fine firm whose principals have a distinguished pedigree among the best dealers in American art from the 1950s, when the market for old American things started to have a real pulse. They had a smashing Winslow Homer Adirondack watercolor from 1892. It’s never been on the market, belonging to the same family since Homer painted it. At a bit over $6 million, it was the most expensive thing I saw. It’s very beautiful, obviously has been treated well, and has a nice combination of Homer’s illustration-style clarity and his supreme late-career abstraction.
Menconi also has John Singer Sargent’s oval portrait of the Countess of Essex from around 1906. What can I say? It’s the apotheosis of hauteur. Sargent decided in 1907 that he would paint, as he sarcastically wrote, “no more paughtraits.” He felt he was on a flattery treadmill, especially when he painted aristocrats, those flattery sponges. Some of these late aristocratic pictures do look mechanical, but here he was at the top of his game.
It’s an oval picture, which gives it a French rococo feel, but its beauty is in Sargent’s free paint handling. It’s like frosting on a wedding cake, or fluffy clouds. She’s part cherub and delectable but not without spine. Sargent used the same puffs-of-cotton treatment on Nancy Astor in his portrait of her, about the same time. Mrs. Astor rises into the heavens like the angel she definitely wasn’t. Both women, like Sargent, were Americans who went native, though Sargent always considered himself American in citizenship and spirit.' BRIAN ALLEN
Read the full article here: National Review: 'The Winter Show'
