John Singer Sargent

The most popular portrait painter of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) described himself as “a man of prodigious talent.” [1] Painting in Paris, London, New York, and Boston, Sargent invested his subjects with elegance, vitality, and, in his most successful portraits, keen psychological insights.

Born in Florence to expatriate American parents, Sargent was descended from a long line of illustrious forebears and never renounced his American citizenship; he first visited America as an adult. He spent his childhood and youth traveling in France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Young Sargent’s peripatetic existence meant that his schooling was frequently interrupted; he did study briefly in Florence and Dresden. Having exhibited a talent for art from an early age, he assisted a painter in Rome at the age of twelve. At the age of eighteen, the Sargent family moved to Paris so that he could study formally with Émile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, who advised “Search for the half-tone, put down some accents, and then the lights … Velasquez, Velasquez, Velasquez, ceaselessly study Velasquez.” Later that year, Sargent passed the entrance examinations for the École des Beaux Arts and enrolled in the prestigious art school. Intensive study and work with his mentor Carolus-Duran undoubtedly improved his skills, but his contemporaries recognized his genius early on. [2]

Between 1877 and 1882, Sargent created his first major works, the so-called “subject pictures”—paintings depicting local life in distinctive locales reflecting Sargent’s love of travel. The brilliantly painted Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, 1878, Corcoran Gallery of Art, captured a Brittany beach alive with local peasants and shimmering reflecting pools. Fumée d’ambre Gris, 1880, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, is an exotic scene of a veiled Moroccan woman standing over an incense burner; the sun-bleached walls and her creamy costume show Sargent experimenting with tone-on-tone painting, somewhat akin to James Whistler’s The White Girl, 1874, National Gallery of Art, Washington. The dark and spirited El Jaleo, 1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, depicts a Spanish gypsy dancer and demonstrates Sargent’s skill with dramatic lighting, foreshortening, and composition. All of these paintings were received favorably at the Paris Salon, marking Sargent’s acceptance into the first rank of painters in France.

At the same time, the artist began using portraiture to demonstrate his skill, exhibiting portraits of his teacher Carolus-Duran, 1879, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Parisian doctor Samuel Pozzi, in Dr. Pozzi at Home, 1881, the Armand Hammer Collection, Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California, and The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, as advertisements for potential clients. Always, however, Sargent experimented with composition, form, color, and props. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, for example, is less a straightforward group portrait of four little girls than an exercise in modern composition and a tribute to the genius of his idol, Velasquez, and his iconic painting Las Meninas, 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid. With his portrait of the Paris socialite Virginie Gautreau, however, Sargent’s radical experimentations backfired. Entitled Madame X, 1883–1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the painting scandalized Parisian society with the frankly sexual way it depicted Mme. Gautreau, her form-fitting dress, her plunging neckline, and her shocking, albeit fashionable, pallor. Originally painted as if one of the dress’s straps had fallen off the sitter’s shoulder, suggesting that her breast might be revealed, Madame X ruined Sargent’s reputation. Two years later, he moved to London in an attempt to salvage his career.

Sargent never gave up his love of travel, and his work from the 1880s into the twentieth century shows him painting picturesque countrysides, towns, and villagers, both in oil and in watercolor, in England, France, Italy, Switzerland, North Africa, Greece, and Turkey. His watercolors are especially fresh and charming. After he moved permanently to England, however, he devoted more and more time to commissioned portraits of the wealthy and aristocratic. Two trips to the United States in the late 1880s—where patrons, eager to sit for him, perceived him as stylish, cosmopolitan, and European—proved very beneficial to his career. In America, he painted Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1888, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, placing her before a dramatic brocade tapestry that creates a mandorla around her form. In England, paintings such as Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892, National Gallery of Scotland, and The Wyndham Sisters, 1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art, epitomize the elegance and virtuosic skill that placed him in such high demand. He was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1897.

By 1907, the demands for his services overpowered him, and he resolved to give up portraiture altogether; he relaxed this self-imposed rule only a few times over the next two decades. He was able, for the first time, to give his attention fully to the projects that had been his passion since his trip to America in 1890: murals for the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Widener Library at Harvard University. Sargent took weighty and dramatic themes as his subjects, such as The Triumph of Religion for the Boston Public Library. He mined his knowledge of classical and biblical subjects gained from years of voracious reading and travel throughout Europe and the Middle East in search of inspiration and source material. He painted the murals on canvases in England, then traveled to Boston several times to oversee their installation. Sargent felt that the murals were his most important achievement. [3]

Stiff and reserved by nature, and zealously devoted to the practice of art, even in times of leisure, Sargent never married. According to biographers, he demonstrated profound discomfort in the company of anyone outside of his most intimate circle, which included childhood friends Ben del Castillo and the writer Vernon Lee. Occasionally, Sargent formed relationships of mutual admiration with luminaries from the world of art, literature, and music, notably Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. A childhood spent being constantly uprooted meant that he formed the closest relationships with his mother and sister, who lived with or near him his entire life. It was just such a group of relatives and close friends that gathered on the night of April 14, 1925, to bid him bon voyage as he set sail to oversee the installation of the Museum of Fine Arts murals. He died the next day. The Times of London called his death the “end of an epoch in English art.” [4]

Notes:

[1] Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 102.

[2] Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1999), 272, 23, and 12.

[3] Kilmurray and Ormond, John Singer Sargent, 46.

[4] Olson, John Singer Sargent, 268 and 269.