William Sergeant Kendall

Most of us thought of William Sergeant Kendall chiefly as a talented portrait and figure painter. Many of his best known paintings, including the lovely studies of children— “Psyche,” “Narcissa,” and the rest—which brought him early recognition and took awards in exhibitions from 1891 onward, are in the principal American museums. He was less known for his work in sculpture, though his interest in this medium was almost as intense as his interest in painting. Here, as well as in painting, his approach was traditional and followed none of the extremer modern theories. The familiar story told of many sculptors has been told of him—that an early work in bronze, the head of a Breton peasant girl, was so accurately modeled that it was refused by the Paris Salon on the theory that it must have been cast from life. He was eternally experimenting in methods of painting or modeling. Scientific theories of color and light, of symmetry and proportion, fascinated him. He was one of the early backers of Jay Hambidge, in that artist’s exposition of the so-called dynamic, or Greek, as opposed to the static, or Gothic, symmetry. When he built his own house in Virginia, he himself designed it down to the smallest details, including the grounds, in accordance with the principles of Greek symmetry.

Kendall had many other interests and enthusiasms, which flowed naturally from a vivid and many-sided personality. “A devoted amateur of chamber music,” a Centurion writes, “he would often continue playing, generally at the desk of the second violin, until a late hour of the night, with others who shared his passion for the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms. Of his other interests, horses held chief place. From his early years at Barrytown-on-Hudson, through his time as Dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts, he was never without his own mounts. But it was only when he moved to Virginia that he was able to gratify a boyhood wish, namely to own an Arabian stallion. With the purchase, some eighteen years ago, of a purebred Arab stallion and mare—whose pedigrees, he loved to assert, could be traced back to the mares of Solomon—it was his intention to found a stable and breed colts for sale. But somehow, as the foals came along, he could never bring himself to part with them. He kept both the younger horses, which he broke to the saddle, and the older ones, to be ridden by himself, his family, and friends over the roads and trails of the Hot Springs Valley.”

It was one of his regrets that the circumstances of his life prevented his spending more time at the Century. Never a man who made friends readily or with a wide circle, he yet had, for the Century fellowship, a feeling of which nothing ever quite took the place. Some of his oldest and closest friends were Centurions. One of these was John Jay Chapman, whose portrait, by Kendall, hung on the north wall of our Gallery, in the 1937 exhibition, one of those devoted to the memory of literary Centurions.

Geoffrey Parsons
1938 Century Memorials