In
February 2024, Tate Britain will open a major exhibition dedicated to the great
portrait painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). It will reveal Sargent’s
ground-breaking role as a stylist, fashioning the image his sitters presented
to the world through sartorial choices. Staged in collaboration with the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston, the exhibition will feature 60 paintings – including
rare loans as well as works drawn from Tate and MFA’s extensive collections.
These will be shown alongside more than a dozen period dresses and accessories,
many of which were worn by his sitters. Several of these garments will be
reunited for the first time with Sargent’s portraits of their wearers, offering
a fresh perspective on the most celebrated portraitist of his generation and
the society in which he worked.
Sargent
was renowned for the ability to bring his subjects to life. Rather than being
driven purely by the sensibilities of his wealthy clientele, he used dress and
fashion as a powerful tool to establish their individuality while proclaiming
his own aesthetic agenda. He worked collaboratively with his sitters, but also
took creative liberties, changing and omitting details as he saw fit. He
regularly chose their outfits or manipulated their clothing, as in Lady Sassoon
1907, which will be displayed at the start of the exhibition alongside the
original black taffeta opera cloak worn in the image, revealing how he pulled,
wrapped, and pinned the fabric to add drama to his portrait. In this respect,
Sargent was working in a similar way to how an art director at a fashion shoot
would today.
The
exhibition will tell the stories behind the artist’s key patrons, including
nobility and influential members of the community. Collectively, Sargent’s
portraits of the elite offer a compelling representation of fashionable high
society at the turn of the century. Highlights will include Lady Helen Vincent,
Viscountess d’ Abernon 1904 and Mrs. Charles E. Inches (Louise Pomeroy) 1887,
which will be juxtaposed with the red velvet evening dress illustrated. The
regalia worn by Charles Stewart, sixth Marquess of Londonderry at the
Coronation of Edward VII 1904 will be reunited with the painting to show how
the artist conveyed both rank and personality through clothing. Sargent was
able to take even more creative freedoms with non-commissioned portraits, such
as his iconic painting of socialite Virginie Amélie Gautreau, Madame X 1883-4,
which caused a stir at the Salon by salaciously showing Mme Gautreau with one
diamond strap falling from her shoulder. The exhibition will present both Tate
and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s versions of this infamous work. Sargent’s
artistic process and relationships will be further explored using photographs,
drawings, garments, and accounts written by his sitters. Key works such as Mrs
Montgomery Sears 1899 will be shown alongside Mrs Sears’ own dresses and her
photographs of Sargent at work, while Mrs Fiske Warren and her Daughter Rachel
1903 will be displayed with photographs documenting the portrait sittings in
process.
Sargent
and Fashion will also explore the artist’s subversion of social codes and
conventions through portraiture. His clothing choices suggest the blurring of
characteristics that once defined masculine and feminine appearance, reflecting
the shifting ground of traditional gender roles at the end of the 19th century.
Sargent's portrait Vernon Lee 1881 exemplifies this approach. Lee was the
pseudonym of the British writer Violet Paget, who used the name professionally
and personally. Her preference for severe, almost masculine clothing, shows a
refusal to conform to conventional notions of femininity. The exhibition will
also feature one of Sargent’s most dramatic and unconventional male portraits,
Dr Pozzi at Home 1881, depicting the aesthete surgeon Samuel-Jean Pozzi in a
flamboyant red dressing gown and Turkish slippers.
In
addition to his wealthy patrons, Sargent chose to portray professional performers,
including dancers, actors, and singers, which allowed him to indulge his taste
for visual spectacle. His dramatic image of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth 1889
will be shown alongside Terry’s dress and cloak, as well as La Carmencita 1890,
depicting 21-year-old Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who performed in
music halls across the United States, Europe, and South America. For the first
time, visitors will be able to view this stunning portrait next to the dancer’s
sparkling yellow satin costume. Together, this collection of paintings and
garments offer a new generation and those already familiar with his work the
chance to discover and reconsider Sargent and his enduring influence.
Sargent
and Fashion, 22 February - 7 July 2024.
Tate, November 9, 2023.
Was John
Singer Sargent just a talented flatterer of his wealthy patrons or was there
more to him?
Two Arts
Fuse critics were interested in reviewing the same show— Fashioned by Sargent,
currently at the Museum of the Fine Arts through January 15, 2024. In the past,
the magazine has published more than one review of the same event, an
experiment meant to relive the era when there were many newspapers in every
large city and they all supported critics, leading to varied points of view on
every concert, play, performance, or art exhibition.
This
time we are trying something else, more like a conversation. We will post twice
on the Sargent show. The post below features Kathleen Stone’s brief initial responses
to the show, followed by a reaction by Peter Walsh before he has seen the
exhibition. The second piece will feature Peter’s longer survey of and thoughts
about the show followed by Kathleen’s longer response and summing up.
Readers,
please feel free to add your voices to the dialogue and our critics will
respond to you as well.
— Editor
Bill Marx
Hi
Peter,
I’ve
just been to the Sargent exhibit at the MFA and can’t wait to hear your
thoughts, just as soon as you’ve had a chance to see it. For now, I’ll share
some of my reactions.
If you
like the work of John Singer Sargent, this is a chance to indulge. More than 50
paintings are collected here, together with some of the clothing, hats, and
other accessories seen in his portraits. As a portrait painter, Sargent had a
reputation for commandeering the process: telling the person what to wear,
where to sit, and how to pose, all to capture his vision of the person.
Exploring that process, clothing choices in particular, is the animating idea
behind Fashioned by Sargent. But is the artist’s direction of clothing choices
— and how he painted the garments — a sufficiently compelling inquiry in which
to anchor an exhibit? I look forward to discussing that question with you.
Also, whether the exhibit fully explores the question.
The
first portrait you see when entering the exhibit is stunning. It’s Lady
Sassoon, born Aline de Rothschild, of London. She’s wearing a black taffeta
opera coat, with salmon pink lining. The actual garment is displayed next to
the painting, giving you an idea of how it might feel to move about in
something so luxe, and inviting comparison to Sargent’s painted version, which
is slimmed down and draped to accentuate the glowing pink lining.
This is
a relatively minor manipulation, but a small photograph illustrates that
Sargent sometimes went to much greater lengths to stage a portrait. The photo,
from 1903, shows him painting the portrait of Mrs. Fiske Warren and her
daughter Rachel. Mother and daughter are perched on an uncomfortable chair in
the middle of the Gothic Room of what is now the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum. There is nothing homey or comfortable about the scene. Apparently, Mrs.
Warren wore a borrowed pink gown that did not fit, and Rachel was draped in
pink fabric that Sargent had to paint into a gown. But pink was the color
Sargent thought would best compliment their coloring, and he must have thought
the room’s details would provide an appropriately decorative background. In the
finished portrait, Rachel rests her chin on her mother’s shoulder, their pink
dresses plausibly sketched. The cold, open space of the Gothic Room is shrunk;
you are invited to assume that they are comfortably at home.
As I
moved through the rooms of portraits, I played a game with myself, imagining
which of Sargent’s subjects I would like to meet in a neighborhood coffee shop.
Silly as this sounds, it was a way of responding to the person presented on the
canvas. Of course, clothing is part of the presentation, but I tried to focus
on the face and the feeling that gave me. It turns out I would have liked to
meet a number of Sargent’s subjects, including Lady Sassoon. And of course, I’m
interested to hear how you respond to them.
—
Kathleen Stone
Hi
Kathleen,
Thanks
so much for your email. As you know, I haven’t seen the show yet and am
responding from that point of view, having spent a fair amount of my book
reviewing time recently with Sargent and Sargent’s circle in Boston, especially
Isabella Stewart Gardner. To clue in our readers: we are engaged in a kind of
duo review. After I actually see the show, I will write up my reactions and you
will respond to those in a second posting (I’m giving you, I just realized,
both the first and last words!)
In
anticipation of this project, I have been thinking about the changeable weather
of Sargent’s reputation and his rather peculiar influence on Boston’s art
community well after his death. Sargent started out in 19th-century Paris as a
youthful prodigy, known for his breathtaking technique and a certain raffish daring.
He overstepped that fashionable edginess in one portrait to create a huge,
unexpected scandal that almost ended his career and precipitated his move from
Paris to London. Some 50 years later, though, he was considered impossibly old
fashioned, stuffy, tame, and out of touch with the revolutionary art that
emerged after 1900. That stodgy image stuck to him for most of the 20th century
(except in Boston) until, in the last couple decades before the 21st, he made a
spectacular comeback. Once again his work was hailed as racy, sumptuous, and,
well, even sexy. He also attracted an enthusiastic band of youngish fans and
was widely admired and beloved as never before.
One
cultural issue that has emerged since the last round of major Sargent shows,
though, is the “woke” awareness of historic racial and class domination in the
United States and Europe. Let’s face it, Sargent’s society portraits are just
dripping with white privilege in its most blatant forms, just when European
colonialism was at its peak. Sargent did make private watercolors of Bedouins
in North Africa, but people of color are never the subject of his formal
portraits in oil, even though one of Sargent’s most important models in Boston
was a local African-American man (Sargent always portrayed him, in works
intended for public consumption, as white). Will the new cultural attitudes
eclipse Sargent’s reputation yet again? Will he be canceled? So far I am seeing
no signs of this. Does the MFA allude to the issue at all?
I was
intrigued by your wish to meet some of Sargent’s more interesting-looking
female subjects. One of them, Lady Aline Sassoon, whose impressive portrait you
say opens the show, was, along with a number of Sargent’s British patrons,
associated with the Souls, a clique of high-powered men and women devoted to
the art-for-art’s-sake ideals of the Aesthetic Movement. The group also
included Evan Charteris, who became Sargent’s first serious biographer. I
suspect you would have found some interesting things to talk about.
Kathleen Stone is the author of They Called Us Girls: Stories
of Female Ambition from Suffrage to Mad Men, an exploration of the lives and
careers of women who defied narrow, gender-based expectations in the mid-20th
century.
Peter Walsh has worked as a staff member or consultant to
such museums as the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the
Davis Museum at Wellesley College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National
Gallery of Art, and the Boston Athenaeum. He has published in American and
European newspapers, journals, and in scholarly anthologies and has lectured at
MIT, in New York, Milan, London, Los Angeles and many other venues. In recent
years, he began a career as an actor and has since worked on more than 100
projects, including theater, national television, and award-winning films. He
is completing a novel set in the 1960s.
Visual
Arts Review: “Fashioned by Sargent” — Round One. By Kathleen Stone and Peter
Walsh. The Arts Fuse, November 6 2023.
Was John
Singer Sargent just a talented flatterer of his wealthy patrons or was there
more to him?
Two Arts
Fuse critics were interested in reviewing the same show — Fashioned by Sargent,
currently at the Museum of the Fine Arts through January 15, 2024. In the past,
the magazine has published more than one review of the same event, an
experiment meant to relive the era when there were a number of newspapers in
every large city and they all supported critics, leading to varied points of
view on every concert, play, performance, or art exhibition.
This
time we are trying something else, more like a conversation. We will post more
than once on the Sargent show. The first installment features Kathleen Stone’s
brief initial thoughts about the show, followed by a reaction by Peter Walsh
before he has seen the exhibition. The post below features Walsh’s incisive
impressions of the exhibition and a response by Kathleen.
Readers,
please feel free to add your voices to the dialogue and our critics will
respond to you as well. The magazine has already had a provocative commentary
on Fashioned by Sargent from critic and artist Mary Sherman.
— Editor
Bill Marx
Hi
Kathleen,
So I
have finally, actually seen Fashioned by Sargent and am ready to write my
second post in our collaborative review.
This is
a very interesting, thought-provoking show of major works by one of the most
important artists in Western portraiture. There is a lot — too much — to write
about.
I’d like
to start by going back to a couple of points you made in your initial post (you
had already seen the show). Yes, this is an important exhibition: 50 works by a
great virtuoso of the brush, including several of his most famous portraits.
Anyone with even a passing interest in Sargent or portraiture should definitely
take this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and go see it. This is not to say
I didn’t have many reservations about the MFA’s framing and presentation of the
topic. Much more about this in a bit.
I have
always had a soft spot for artists with brilliant drafting skills: the ability
vividly to evoke the real world in brushwork or line while also displaying a
great command of art as art rather than simple reproduction. Michelangelo,
Bronzino, the Carracci brothers, Guido Reni, Rembrandt, Ingres, Degas, Picasso
— these are all artists who delighted in showing off their great gifts for
rendering life in line. Sargent is part of the tradition. The revival of
interest in Sargent that began at the end of the last century must owe a lot, I
think, to this sheer virtuosity. It is easy to delight in his rendering of
folded fabric, beautiful faces, rich costumes, and the human body, clothed or
nude, in a striking pose.
But was
Sargent just a talented flatterer of his wealthy patrons or was there more to
him?
The
second point I would like to take up is your question “whether the artist’s
direction of clothing choices, and how he painted the garments, is a
sufficiently compelling inquiry to anchor an exhibit.” My conclusion is that,
yes, it is, but that the MFA probably hasn’t managed to pull it off, which
leads me to another question you asked: “whether the exhibit fully explores the
question.”
Sargent
was interested in clothes and dressing, but not particularly in high fashion.
As a portraitist, he was interested in clothing primarily as a painterly
effect. When he couldn’t find the right effects in a client’s ample and highly
fashionable wardrobe, he could resort to an ill-fitting, borrowed gown or even
a flourished length of untailored cloth. Or he just made things up, whole cloth
as it were, on the canvas.
So the
name of the show, Fashioned by Sargent, despite its clever punning, gets things
off on the wrong foot. Besides falsely connecting Sargent to the glamorous
world of fashion and designers, the title vaguely suggests that he was some
kind of old school version of the contemporary Hollywood profession of “fashion
consultant” — people whom actors and other celebrities pay to tell them what to
wear to high-profile red carpet events like the Oscars, with an emphasis on
status-conferring designer labels. This is not what Sargent was up to at all.
He didn’t particularly care who made the dress; in fact, he often passed up the
glittering designer evening gown for something much more domestic and ordinary.
He did commission, for one portrait on view, a “fancy dress” gown from the
premier Paris dressmaker, House of Worth. Worth considered his creations to be
works of art, with “Delacroix’s sense of color.” The Worth gowns in the show
tend to reinforce his claims. He is an unexpected sidebar star of the show.
The
problem is that the exhibition ultimately fails to come up with an encompassing
theory of Sargent’s approach to dressing his sitters. Part of the difficulty is
just a lack of hard facts. Like most artists, Sargent made no formal record of
his sessions with his clients. So Fashioned by Sargent is forced to rely on
snippets gleaned from letters and “family lore,” which is not highly reliable.
The premise suggests that the physical fashions on view, posed in glass cases
near the portraits, are the ones Sargent painted. But this is only sometimes
the case. When the historic model is not available, the curators make
substitutions, sometimes using other dresses from the sitter’s wardrobe that
are not anything like what Sargent would have chosen himself. In other cases
only a fragment survives, or else the dress has been so altered over time that
it “is and isn’t” the garment in the painting.
The
label copy describes the sitters’ costumes formally, using language similar to
that of a society reporter; there are extensive quotes from newspaper accounts
of the time. Sargent, the labels conclude, favored black and white, the latter
apparently because of the color variations and shapes he could render in paint—
an interesting observation, but not a particularly compelling one. A more
intriguing question, if one more difficult to answer, would have been why the
furious controversies over a handful of Sargent’s paintings always seem to have
been inspired by his sitters’ clothes — Madame X in particular, but also Dr. Pozzi at Home and
other works — rather than the lack of them, as had been the case a few years
earlier with Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.
Fashioned
by Sargent is confusing in other ways as well. The labels wander off into side
issues, including gender roles, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and other
trending contemporary topics without ever really exploring them. They
frequently describe Sargent’s clients as “friends” and “close friends.” The
terms suggest Sargent lived beside his clients on comfortable terms, cocooned
in a world of affluence and high privilege. This glosses over a host of
complicating factors in late 19th-century social relations.
Socially,
who was Sargent to his sitters? People often assume that Sargent’s family, like
those of his sitters, was wealthy. It was not. Sargent’s father’s family had
had money but lost it; moreover, the elder Sargent had given up his career in
medicine when his family took up a life as perpetual tourists in Europe. Mrs.
Sargent had inherited enough — just — to support the family as long as they
stayed in Europe, where the cost of living was lower. There the Sargent’s
stayed in hotels and furnished apartments, moving to a different city every few
months, owning little more than their clothes.
The family’s
constant moves made it all but impossible for the young John Singer Sargent to
attend local schools. His parents were reluctant to send him to a boarding
school, perhaps because of the added expense. They also resisted art training
until John’s obvious talent and devotion made them relent. Though he spoke four
languages and knew the art history of Europe from firsthand encounters in
museums, Sargent’s only formal education began when he entered, at age 18, the
Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, the world’s most prestigious art school.
All this
meant that, for all his continental polish and talent, Sargent’s socioeconomic
status was far below that of most of his society patrons, which included the de
Rothchilds and the Sassoons, two of the richest families in the history of the
planet. As a portrait painter, he was always “in trade,” always alert to the
next connection to the next client rich enough to pay his increasingly high fees.
It was, at least at first, a precarious life; he had nothing else to fall back
on. Sargent was prolific because he had to be. Relations with sitters could be
cordial and even warm, but they were essentially business transactions, much
like the relation of a stockbroker to his clients.
Given
his situation, what did Sargent make of his talents? Broadly speaking, he made
three kinds of portraits. There were the formal society commissions, which are
the focus of the MFA’s exhibition. For these Sargent received jaw-dropping
fees. There are the “spec portraits” like Madame X, that were not commissions.
Sargent made them from acquaintances or friends, sometimes from models he
encountered on his travels. These were intended as eye-catching compositions he
hoped would make a splash at the Paris Salon and other high-profile
exhibitions; this notoriety would bring him more sales and commissions (Madame
X was a serious miscalculation). Finally there were his portraits of close
friends and family that he seemed to make primarily for his own enjoyment.
The
division is partly expressed, if a bit clumsily, in the exhibition’s design.
The show begins and ends with large, brightly lit galleries painted in pastel
shades. In between there is a series of long, narrow spaces like corridors. The
walls are painted dark shades, as if to evince the moody atmosphere of the
Aesthetic Movement interiors of the era. Some are covered in tendril-dense
William Morris wallpapers. The day I visited, though, the galleries were choked
with holiday visitors and the winding spaces created bottlenecks that forced
you to move fairly close to the paintings to see them. Unfortunately, the
dramatic lighting created hot spots at that distance, often obliterating the
faces.
These
Gilded Age faces so rarely look relaxed. Only when the sitters and painter had
a genuinely cordial relationship, as Sargent had with the Wertheimer family, do
they seem to be happy with him watching them. The tension intimates the
Faustian bargain they have made with the celebrated painter: not only to make
them look handsome and impressive, but to make them immortal.
For all
its current romanticization, the Gilded Age lasted barely a generation. It was
a period of furious social climbing and competition, old money vs. new and new
money vs. newer, lavish displays of wealth, gigantic, grotesquely overdecorated
houses, and a complicated social code that could trip up the most confident
socialite. Life, especially for women, was an endless round of generally
tedious social obligations: interminable dinner parties with endless courses,
teas, outings, social visits, nights at the opera, each requiring a different
set of clothes. Edith Wharton brilliantly captured the ethos in her greatest
novel, The Custom of the Country. On top of this, the unregulated capitalism of
the 19th century was turbulent, with regular panics, bank runs, and crashes.
Even the grandest Gilded Age fortune could smash like a falling chandelier.
How
different are the portraits of Sargent’s true friends. Just before the last
gallery hangs a sensuous portrait of Albert de Belleroche, an old friend from
Sargent’s student days. Although the label doesn’t mention it, de Belleroche is
one of several close male friends that have been described as Sargent’s lovers.
The large sword in a sketch of de Belleroche reproduced on the label has even
been described by a Sargent biographer as a “phallic symbol.”
The
claims of homosexual affairs are all insinuations: there is not a scrap of hard
evidence to support any of it. Yet they are reinforced by the large number of
male nude studies Sargent made that began to be exhibited in the ’80s. These
frankly sensuous images have been sensationally described as “secret.” A better
word would be “private” or “unexhibited” or just “neglected.” After Sargent’s
death in 1925, his sisters gave stacks of nude studio studies to art museums,
including several institutions in Boston. Another set of male nudes decorated
Sargent’s dining room in London. They are partly just extensions of the formal
exercises of the Ecole de Beaux Arts’ curriculum, though their belated
revelation formed an important role in the process of reevaluating Sargent’s
achievements in the 1990s. After decades languishing in the dusty attic of the
Gilded Age, Sargent suddenly seemed edgy and cool again.
Presumably
because they are not wearing clothes, none of these male studies is included in
the MFA show. But they, like the portraits in the last gallery, suggest the
kind of career Sargent might have had if he had not been drawn into society
portrait painting. (He did eventually give up society portraits, but by then
the focus of his career had been set.) In these brightly lit images, mostly
exterior scenes, family and friends — and another reputed lover, long-time
model and valet Nicola d’Iverno — sprawl over the ground and each other in
poses that completely ignore the social proprieties of the day. If Sargent had
given himself to the subjects that gave him the most joy, what else might he
have fashioned?
Peter
Walsh has worked as a staff member or consultant to such museums as the Harvard
Art Museums, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Davis Museum at Wellesley
College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the
Boston Athenaeum. He has published in American and European newspapers,
journals, and in scholarly anthologies and has lectured at MIT, in New York,
Milan, London, Los Angeles and many other venues. In recent years, he began a
career as an actor and has since worked on more than 100 projects, including
theater, national television, and award-winning films. He is completing a novel
set in the 1960s.
Hi
Peter,
Your
comments about the Sargent show make for a delightful read.
Thank
you for reminding me of Sargent’s biographical background, familiar territory
for you, judging from your review last year of Paul Fisher’s biography, The
Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World. Sargent’s life in Europe must
have provided access to a broad range of clients, both European and American.
That, together with his outstanding skill and social panache, made him the
sought-after portraitist for scores of wealthy individuals and families on both
sides of the Atlantic. He did not need to come from their world in order to
succeed among them.
As I
mentioned in the first round of our collaboration, I fantasized about which of
Sargent’s subjects I would have liked to spend time with, maybe over coffee in
a local café. This is my idiosyncratic response to the persons I perceived on
canvas. Since then, I have done a little research and decided to enlarge the
group of subjects I would invite for hypothetical coffee. Many of the women
were highly educated and talented but most were unable or unwilling to abandon
the role of society doyenne. Did they privately wish to spend their time in
other ways?
This
sort of musing brings a contemporary outlook to portraits painted more than a
century ago. I hesitate to push it too far because, in my experience,
“presentism” seldom enhances enjoyment of the art or deepens an understanding
of the artist. The museum, too, flirts with “presentism.” As you mention, a
number of wall labels refer to contemporary concerns, such as gender roles,
colonialism, and cultural appropriation, without really exploring these issues.
I found these references distracting and perfunctory, as though boxes had been
checked.
I
appreciate your taking up two of my questions — whether the exhibit is a
response to a sufficiently hefty question, and whether that inquiry has been
thoughtfully probed. I don’t have much to add, only one detail that underscores
how little is known about how Sargent interacted with his clients about
clothing. Sargent painted his friend Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears in a white
gown, but we are told that she loved color. The label poses a rhetorical
question – who decided what she wore? The insinuation is clear, but there is no
way to know the answer.
Two
final thoughts. The portrait of Edith, Lady Playfair, pulls together many
interesting facets of Sargent’s portraiture. Edith grew up on Beacon Street in
Boston and married a British man, an example of the cross-Atlantic society of
the era. She wears what is described as an afternoon dress. Even with its boned
bodice and huge bustle, an afternoon dress was more informal than evening wear.
Sargent posed her next to a bunch of chrysanthemums that reflect the peach
color of her bodice. But what I like best is the swath of peach-colored ribbon
perched on top of the black bustle. The satin and velvet textures are so
palpable and the colors are exquisite —
reminders of Sargent’s immense talent. Last, I agree with you that the
pictures in the final gallery are a highlight. Bright, informal, and often
staged outdoors, their creative spark was infectious.
Visual
Arts Review: “Fashioned by Sargent” — Round Two. By Peter Walsh and Kathleen Stone. The Arts Fuse, December 8, 2023.
Fans,
gowns, beaded dress pumps, even a French hat ornament constructed from the
stuffed body of a bird-of-paradise, complement the 50 paintings assembled for
“Fashioned by Sargent” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, currently on view
through January 15, 2024. The exhibition focuses on American expatriate artist
John Singer Sargent’s relationship to fashion, demonstrating how he used
costumes and textiles to frame his subjects and show off his artistic
virtuosity.
The
costumes are splendid; some of them, such as the black taffeta and
pink-silk-lined opera cloak that belonged to Aline Caroline de Rothschild, Lady
Sassoon, are restored heirlooms kept in the families of the sitters for
generations. Others are approximations of the clothes Sargent’s subjects wore,
such as the piece of antique lace and swatch of tapestry that nearly match the
Velázquez-like costume that Jewish British collector Mathilde Hirsch posed in.
As you
go through the galleries, you can see how the artist draped shawls, pinned back
silks, and carefully arranged bulky hoop skirts to create windows for light and
color or opportunities to exercise the wild joy of his rapid brushstrokes. But
what actually stands out is the extraordinary lucidity of Sargent’s characters.
You can’t help feeling you’ve seen the faces before.
Even
though it might be the figure of a countess who lived well over a hundred years
ago, there is a resemblance, you think, to someone you know. Many of these are
Jewish faces, and this isn’t surprising, since Sargent had a number of Jewish
friends and Jews stood out among his most important supporters.
Sargent,
who was born in Florence in 1856 and died in London in 1925, didn’t leave
behind a diary or journal. Most of what we know about his personal life, or his
relationship to his upper-class Jewish patrons living in late-Victorian or
Edwardian England, comes from people who knew him or from his own slapdash
correspondence, scribbled in an eccentric handwriting. At the turn of the
century, he was the most sought-after portraitist in Europe and America,
charging 1,000 guineas for a painting, equivalent to about $161,000 today.
Biographers
who knew him characterized Sargent as an autodidact who was meticulously
orderly with his work schedule but otherwise otherworldly, disengaged from
current events and uncomfortably shy in the highest society, where he was known
to “splutter” and grasp for words. He had grown up in an eccentric family that
left Philadelphia for Europe when they were in mourning after the death of
their first-born child. While his father was trained as a surgeon and his
mother had a small amount of inherited wealth, they were not rich and lived an
itinerant life in rented rooms, moving from city to city.
Sargent
was not formally schooled until his talent as an artist was recognized. The
roots of his education were in museum galleries, where his mother taught him to
copy what he saw onto a drawing pad. When he was 18, he enrolled in the Paris
atelier of the portrait artist Carolus-Duran, who revered the work of Frans
Hals and Diego Velázquez. In the studio, Sargent was a star. Among
friends—those who shared his love of literature, theater, art and music (he was
a gifted amateur
pianist)—he
was genial and warm. His circle included members of several distinguished
Jewish families who are represented in the show: the Sassoons, the Meyers,
Mathilde and Leopold Hirsch, and Asher and Flora Wertheimer.
This was
the time when the wealth of England’s aristocracy was diminishing, and America’s
robber barons and Jewish financiers were perceived as a threat to the old
social order. Art historians have suggested that as an American living in
England and, most probably, as a closeted gay man, Sargent felt an affinity
with London’s assimilated and cosmopolitan Jews, who were insiders and
outsiders just as he was. Together they navigated racism and bigotry, since
they were living in the era when Oscar Wilde was sentenced to prison for
indecency and Parliament passed the Aliens Act, designed to restrict
immigration of the “wretched” Jews fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe.
One of
the tour-de-force paintings in the exhibition, Mrs. Carl Meyer and her
Children, from 1896, gives viewers a lot to think about, both in terms of
Sargent’s gift of imagination and the complexity of his relationship to his
Jewish patrons. At the time of the painting, Adèle Meyer was known as a
gracious hostess and philanthropist. Her father had made a fortune as a rubber
manufacturer, but she augmented her social status when she married Carl
Ferdinand Meyer, who was the foreign emissary for the British Rothschild bank
before becoming London’s chairman of De Beers. Although the Meyers had been
raised as Jews and were married in a Jewish ceremony, they chose to have their
three children baptized and were themselves buried in a Christian cemetery. The
rococo extravagance of Sargent’s composition, with its textures, colors and
richness of materials, acknowledges the family’s immense wealth as well as
Adèle’s abundant energy as a suffragette and benefactor of many charities
helping children and women.
The
choreography of gestures at the crux of the painting is as complex as any scene
from a Henry James novel: A beautiful, self-assured woman holds an open fan in
one hand while her other hand reaches up to her children. Her beribboned arm
connects her world to theirs as she lightly touches her son’s fingers, and her
daughter protectively wraps an arm around the boy’s shoulder. Sargent has
caught the familial attachment with dexterity, all distilled in a single
narrative moment. The immense, peach-colored gown was apparently an artistic
invention, pieced together from the real gown Mrs. Meyer wore and a concoction
of dresses Sargent drew from his memory and imagination. It was daring for
Sargent to allow the billowing skirt to take up almost half the picture space,
while his unusual foreshortened perspective creates a sense of stable
instability. Art historians have wondered whether that was intended as a
reference to the precariousness of the nouveau riche Jewish family’s social
position. Though most critics acknowledged the achievement of Sargent’s
painting, that didn’t stop truculent remarks such as the one from The Spectator
that read: [Sargent had] “not succeeded in making attractive these
over-civilised European Orientals.”
Two
years after Sargent painted the portrait of the Meyer family, he began work on
his largest commission, from the Jewish art dealer Asher Wertheimer, who had
Sargent paint 12 portraits of his wife, ten children and many dogs. Before the
commission, Sargent and Wertheimer had traveled in the same circles because of
Wertheimer’s business, which specialized in 18th-century French furniture and
Old Master paintings. But the friendship with the family grew over the many
years Sargent worked on their portraits; he was quoted at one point as saying,
“I’m in a state of chronic Wertheimerism.”
It was
said that Sargent especially admired the liveliness of the Wertheimer
daughters. The poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote in his diary, “[Sargent] paints
nothing but Jews and Jewesses now and says he prefers them, as they have more
life and movement than our English women.” This, of course, is not accurate,
since Jews made up a small percentage of Sargent’s clients; out of the 1,400 or
so portraits he did during his lifetime, perhaps only 40 of them are of Jews.
But Sargent did become especially good friends with Ena Wertheimer, Asher’s
oldest daughter, and two paintings of her are included in the Boston show. One
has come to be known as A Vele Gonfie (Italian for In Full Sail). The painting
was a wedding present from her father, celebrating her marriage to the
financier Robert Moritz Mathias. Many years later, Ena secretly sold the
portrait in order to raise funds for an art gallery that she owned,
substituting a copy that had been made by one of Sargent’s assistants. When her
husband found out, he was furious; it took him years to track down the American
collector who had purchased it and to buy it back.
The
exhibition catalog includes a photograph taken at Ena’s wedding. It shows her
serenely seated, dressed in a majestic beaded wedding gown with an extravagant
train. In contrast, Sargent’s three-quarter figure portrait of Ena, far from
bridal, captures her dash and ebullience. Apparently, she had rushed into his
studio one day, characteristically late and impatient about the tediousness of
posing for her portrait. Sargent noticed that her coat seemed to be billowing
with the wind and this gave him the idea to paint her in a way that would show
off her animation and vitality. The portrait that transpired grew out of a
collaboration, a theatrical play in which Sargent suggested she put on a man’s
ceremonial court coat and a cavalier’s plumed hat, transforming her from a
young Jewish woman into a dashing aristocratic man with the swagger of one of
Sargent’s beloved Frans Hals characters. The masquerade freed Ena from the
constraints of traditional portraiture and gave her the ability to move into
her own identity. Looking over her shoulder while stretching her gloved hand
across her chest, she grasps onto what appears to be a cloak that’s about to
blow away; she’s “in full sail.”
While
the monumental portrait of Lady Sassoon subsumed in her black taffeta opera
coat is hung at the start of the exhibition, the more intimate wedding
half-portrait of her daughter Sybil Sassoon, the Countess of Rocksavage, comes
at the end. Together, they form bookends to an exhibition that is as much about
friendship and patronage as about the expressive power of costume. Part of
Sargent’s genius lay in his ability to join forces imaginatively with his
subjects. Fashion and props could help him crystallize characters or draw out
fantasy. One of his favorite props was a Kashmiri shawl, which he used in Sybil
Sasson’s wedding portrait. In England at the turn of the century, such a shawl
would have been imbued with an array of ideas about the faraway Orient, a place
of imagined beauty, artistry and pleasure. What should we make of this portrait
Sargent painted of someone who might accurately be called a Mizrahi princess at
a time when the idea of an “Oriental Jew” was an antisemitic trope? Or that
Sargent gave Sybil the Kashmiri shawl as a wedding gift?
The
painting is a demonstration of some of Sargent’s freest brushwork. The young
woman’s face seems almost to be built sculpturally, as if the bone structure
were modeled by clay rather than paint. The shawl, with its many draped folds,
is a riot of paint strokes. And when you look at Sybil Sassoon’s gaze, you see
nothing but trust in her intelligently serious eyes.
Visual
Moment | John Singer Sargent: Fashioning Art. By Frances Brent. Moment, November 21, 2023.
Sensual
salmon-pink walls greet visitors in the first gallery of Fashioned by Sargent,
the current exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that pairs over 50 works
by the much-loved American portrait painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
with actual garments worn by the elegant subjects in his paintings.
The
color is a fitting backdrop for a single work, a full-length, standing portrait
of Lady Sassoon (1907) displayed here alongside the flowing black taffeta opera
cape she wore in the painting.
“We put
great effort in researching the exact pink tone Sargent used in painting the
lining of Lady Sassoon’s opera cape," said Erica E. Hirshler, the exhibition
organizer and MFA Boston’s Senior Curator of American Paintings, in an animated
conversation with Art & Object. "The color we picked is called
‘Glamour Pink’. We intended to play with the dramatic aspect of Sargent’s work
throughout the exhibition.”
It is
the inherent theatricality in Sargent’s approach to dressing and posing his
subjects that infuses the exhibition with a heightened sense of drama and adds
to the pure pleasure that viewing these masterworks of painterly bravura
invokes. Sargent was the most successful portrait painter of his generation.
Known for his exquisite ability to render the elegant soft fuzz of velvet or
the sheen of satin in the luxuriant folds of a well-dressed Edwardian lady’s
gown, Sargent used fashion not only to demonstrate his painterly skill but as a
powerful tool to depict identity and personality. He regularly chose the
outfits of his subjects or manipulated their clothing. This innovative use of
costume was central to his artwork.
MFA
Boston had begun to conceptualize this exhibition in 2016 long before COVID
struck. “Our interpretive strategy was affected by audience input,” Hirshler
elaborates. “In 2018, we invited museum goers’ participation via our Exhibition
Lab: Sargent and Fashion. We gave people the opportunity to look behind the
scenes to see how exhibitions are created…. We asked the public what type of
manikin they preferred. [to display the garments]…. In offering five different
approaches to labeling we discovered the audience was eager for more story, so
the labels are longer. They wanted to know three things: 1. The identity of the
sitter, 2. The significance of the clothing, and 3. The relationship of the
sitter to the artist. More than just giving facts, my goal was to inspire
people to look.”
Critics
of Sargent have long accused him of being the servant to his mostly wealthy
patrons. Hirshler, who is known as a Sargent scholar, was surprised to learn
this was not the case. “I became aware how in control he was. His sitters
repeatedly said that ‘Sargent told me what to wear,’” she said. In some cases,
he used his imagination. MFA Boston conservator Lydia Vaghts described his
preparation for the Portrait of Lady Helen Vincent (1904): “This is really an
invented garment," said Vaghts. "It was originally white, and Sargent
completely repainted it.” Known as a great English beauty, Lady Vincent wore a
flowing white dress to pose on the balcony of her apartment in Venice. Sargent
painted her wearing that white dress but was dissatisfied, and scraping off the
white paint, he proceeded to paint her in black which contrasted with her
swan-like neck and pearly white skin. He then wrapped her in a pink satin swath
of fabric that may never have existed. While many of the works come from the
MFA’s own extensive collection of Sargent, this painting is on a rare loan from
the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Although
white did not suit the Portrait of Lady Helen Vincent, Sargent frequently chose
to paint his sitters wearing white. He was influenced by the advances in color
theory and optics being explored in Europe at the end of the 19th century. He
used a rainbow of color, delicate tints of pinks and blues to paint the shadows
and light of intricate folds and pleats in his sitters white clothing. The
beautiful Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (Gertrude Vernon), (1892) was often ill and was
reportedly recovering from influenza when Sargent painted her. She reclines
against a flower-patterned armchair in her London home. The white organza
sleeves and ruffled bodice of her gown give a floating, ethereal sensation to
the portrait. Her slim waist is wrapped in a lilac taffeta sash. But her dark
eyes, gazing directly at the viewer, are riveting. She mesmerizes us with her
determined look, in contrast to what we know of her precarious health.
Sargent also
painted families, children, and men with equal attention to dress. The full
length, red robed figure Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881) is a tour de force of red
against red. The esteemed Parisian doctor was a specialist in gynecology. This
unconventional portrait accentuates his striking male beauty that stands in
sharp contrast to the more staid, conventional portraits like the spare seated
figure of aging John D. Rockefeller.
The
elegant standing full-length portrait known as Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau
[Virginie Amélie Avegno], 1883–84), is perhaps Sergeant’s most well-known
image. He considered it one of his best. The black gown with the plunging
neckline worn by Madame Gautreau was intended to show off her figure and she
considered the result a masterpiece. However, when it was displayed at the
Paris Salon in 1884 in its original state with one diamond strap falling from
her shoulder, the painting was ridiculed, called out as a vulgar attempt to
garner attention. Sargent repainted the strap in its proper place, on her
shoulder, in response to the uproar.
Fashioned
by Sargent, which runs through January 15, 2024, is so rich in storytelling it
immerses the viewer in a time and place that recreates the world in which the
artist lived and worked in a way that few other exhibitions have ever
attempted. In one of the exhibits labels describing the importance of dress in
Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, Archer Newland
reflects on his wife’s wardrobe: “He was struck again by the religious
reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages
of dress. ‘It’s their armor,’ he thought, ‘their defense against the unknown,
and their defiance of it.’” Sargent captured that defiance in every stroke.
In John
Singer Sargent’s Portraits, Fashion Takes Center Stage. By Cynthia Close. Art
& Object, November 13, 2023.
The
MFA’s Fashioned by Sargent alludes — only at whisper level — to the fact that
many of John Singer Sargent’s clients represent questionable ideals.
Portrait
painting is a strange genre. Its clientele is typically the rich and famous.
Its aim is to glorify these elites, immortalizing them for prosperity,
typically in a medium steeped in history, meaning oil paint. It is a form of
advertisement, and like all advertising, its aim is to project power, wealth,
seduction, and now and then, a dash of provocation.
Among
the best portraitists of his time was John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). By the
late 1800s, a new ruling class — the colonizers, the landed gentry and, in
America, the uber-industrialists — had risen to power. They, or better yet,
their wives and children, were Sargent’s subjects and now serve as the
marketing draw for the Museum of Fine Arts show Fashioned by Sargent (through
January 15, 2024). Here, viewers are confronted with dozens of paintings of
primarily upper-class Americans and Brits. These are presented in no particular
order, aside from grouping the portraits by such visual clues as people wearing
black and white. The fashions on view are treated nearly the same. Sadly,
combining this strategy with darkened rooms, patterned wallpaper, and harsh
spots, make it impossible to see such works as Lord Ribblesdale front on, which quickly leads to visual fatigue.
Nonetheless,
what can’t be missed is that Sargent’s job was to immortalize his sitters
— to cast them in the same light as the
greats before them, just as our founding fathers borrowed from Greek
architecture to reflect Ancient Greek ideals. Thus, when choosing to paint W.
Graham Robertson — the author, art collector, and sometimes set designer for
Ellen Terry (also portrayed in the show) — Sargent wrapped Robertson in a
full-length coat and set him against a backdrop that readily recalls the
portraits of his illustrious predecessor, the 17th-century painter Sir Anthony
Van Dyke. To further that aim, Sargent gave Robertson a jade-handled walking
stick and, at his feet, Robertson’s fluffed-out poodle, Mouton. By simplifying Robertson’s dress, which also
elongated his figure, and throwing in an elegant cane of an older man of ease,
Sargent presents us with a timeless picture of youth for whom having to toil
long hours to arrive at the leisure his props suggest had already been achieved
— in Robertson’s case, through family wealth.
When
Sargent paints these friends and clients, he is projecting both their
aspirations and his. And that is not surprising. Artworks are products of their
creators and, in Sargent’s case, that was particularly so. Sargent was born and
bred of society and had no desire to leave it. In fact, the opposite. During
his youth, there was hope that Sargent might become the next Diego Velázquez or
Van Dyke of his age. Glimpses of such hope appear in selected passages of
paint, such as the bold swipe of white that trails through the red of one of
the girl’s pinafores and then abruptly stops in The Daughters of Edward Darley
Boit (on view in the museum’s permanent collections). This stroke is a tour de
force of illusion. At the same time, it is a reminder that this is a painting
of a dress. In the hands of a lesser painter, that stroke would have been
finessed to death. But Sargent’s confidence with paint saves it. As does his
understanding of composition, which in this case is lifted straight from
Velazquez’s all-time masterpiece Las Meninas. Sargent’s years of studying
previous such artists, absorbing their lessons, and then adding to that his
natural facility gave his more radical friends, like Claude Monet hope that the
younger man might eventually do more than whip up one canvas of meringue-like
bravura brushwork after another.
Sargent, however, did not oblige.
Sargent
quickly abandoned any adherence to radicality. Only now and then are there
signs of rebellion, as when he
transforms the carpet in the wonderfully painted Madame Ramón
Subercaseaux into a wall of pattern. He turned, even more quickly than his
Swedish equal Andres Zorn, to chronicling his own milieux, using the same
techniques as those before him, which suited his clientele just fine. Sargent
saw no reason to draw attention, as Monet does in Gare Saint-Lazare, to the
clotted coal-filled skies generated by the Industrial Revolution, or the plight
of the working classes, as depicted by the earlier French Realists Honoré
Daumier or Gustave Courbet. And certainly not the gritty New York alleys of his
American compatriots, the artists of the Ashcan School. Nor was Sargent about
to fracture reality with anything that might come close to Cubism.
No,
Sargent’s desire was to revel in society, glorifying his friends, who were
shoring up monopolies, colonizing the world, amassing fortunes, and, in the
process, ignoring the growing protests against economic inequality, voter
disenfranchisement, unequal access to education, and increasing demands for
progressive reform. All of this might be fine — up to a point. It isn’t just
that the museum has skirted dealing with a true assessment of Sargent’s talent,
lumping together all the works as if they are equal (the last room ends up
making little sense). The show alludes — only at whisper level — to the fact
that many of Sargent’s clients represent questionable ideals. We should be
taking a hard look, for instance, at continuing to showcase people like Colonel
Ian Hamilton, whom Sargent painted to commemorate his role in storming
Pakistan’s Dargai Heights, or more clearly stated, serving the British’s
subjugation of that country.
We
should also not be so quick to absolve Sargent and his friends of callously
dressing up in the clothing of those their countries overran, essentially
treating these items as little more than colorful baubles. That this was a
craze at the time does not make the practice right. Nor is the MFA immune from perpetrating
the same. The wall label for Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer, for
instance, suggests that Almina, the daughter of the Jewish art patron (whose
family is well represented in the show), was a willing accomplice in Sargent’s
fanciful depiction of her wearing a light over-garment from Turkey. That may
be, but it ignores the fact that Almina’s main dress – at least, according to
the painting’s owner, the Tate – is Persian, meaning that Sargent had no
qualms about throwing a Turkish overcoat over a dress of its long-time rival.
Worse, the wall text likewise ignores the same, making the show complicit in
asserting what it accuses Sargent of, a “perpetuation of . . . Orientalism,”
lumping together at least two vastly different cultures, under the rubric of
the East.
On top
of this, the reality is that the more likely inspiration for Almina’s portrait
had nothing to do with the Ottoman Empire. It was most probably the great
French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix’s numerous sketchbooks and paintings
of his time in Morocco, which was a French colony. Delacroix traveled there in
1832 on a diplomatic mission, commissioned by King Louis-Philippe. While there,
he chronicled harem life and made detailed sketches and paintings of the Jewish
communities, thanks to introductions by his interpreter. Delacroix was an
artist whose works the Francophone Sargent knew well. Like other, greater
artists before him, Sargent often
cribbed for inspiration, composition, and technique. Thus, it is most likely
that Sargent decided to create Almina’s portrait à la Delacroix – perhaps also
as a nod to the only other country Delacroix traveled to in his lifetime,
England. This explanation is certainly a more likely response to the MFA’s
text, which asks us to consider why a Jewish woman, living in England, would
don what they are questionably calling an Ottoman outfit.
The
MFA’s fixation on the painting’s possible references to the Ottoman Empire is a
missed opportunity to place Sargent’s work in its proper art historical context
and to render the kind of respect to diverse cultures that Sargent’s ilk
withheld. It is this type of cultural insensitivity that, sadly, helped feed
the Western powers’ callous overthrow and then carving up of places like the
Middle East. This has led to the horrific wars and conflicts that we are
witnessing today. Isn’t it time for this to stop?
For two
decades Mary Sherman wrote about the
arts, beginning as a freelancer for the Chicago Reader, followed by being the
art critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, later, as a regular contributor to
The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and ARTnews among many other national and
international publications. In addition to writing, she is a widely exhibited artist,
a teacher at Boston College, and founding director of TransCultural Exchange.
Currently, Mary is at work on her first book And Then the Stars Aligned. It is
part memoir, part Cold War investigative journalism, prompted by the many
unexplained encounters she had with her late father, not the least of which was
his once showing up at an airport, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.
Visual
Arts Commentary: “Fashioned by Sargent” — The Elephant in the Room. By Mary
Sherman. The Arts Fuse, November 9, 2023.
This
October in Boston, two exhibitions shine a light on the American expatriate
artist John Singer Sargent, whose dazzling paintings have rendered him one of
the greatest society portraitists of all time. “Sargent is so often called a
‘fashionable painter,’ but people haven’t fully examined his engagement with
fashion,” says Erica E. Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Painting at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where “Fashioned by Sargent,” an
expansive show featuring about 50 paintings, just opened. Later this month, the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will unveil its companion exhibition,
“Inventing Isabella,” centered by Sargent’s controversial portrait of the
avant-garde patron, who was as celebrated for her masterful collection as for
her Venetian palazzo-inspired home turned museum.
Organized
with Tate Britain, where the show will travel next spring, “Fashioned by
Sargent” represents a homecoming for the artist who, despite being born in
Florence and beginning his career in Paris, considered both Boston and London
his homes. With family in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and clients across the
Northeast, Sargent frequently visited Boston and even had his first-ever solo
show there in 1888. The artist also spent years working on large-scale mural
commissions for Boston establishments, including for the MFA, whose 600-odd
Sargent works represent the most comprehensive assemblage of his art in a public
institution.
Since
joining the MFA in 1983, Hirshler has researched and exhibited Sargent
extensively, but it was while writing a paper on the artist’s portraits of men
that she had a revelation. “I realized how much control Sargent had over the
compositions, and I began to see his portraits as performances where he was
selecting, posing, pinning, and draping, like a director,” explains Hirshler.
Of course, portraitists long before and after Sargent have exercised artistic
license when portraying their sitters’ attire, for both aesthetic and symbolic
purposes. “Sargent had so often been accused of being under the control of his
wealthy, aristocratic sitters, but in fact, he’s telling them what he wants,
and you can see this story through the clothes,” Hirshler continues.
As
reflected in the draped curtains at its entrance, Hirshler conceived “Fashioned
by Sargent” like a performance, too. Organized thematically, the show begins
with a nod to Sargent’s lifelong preoccupation with capturing the way that
light hits fabric: the 1907 portrait of Lady Sassoon, in which she’s swathed in
a black taffeta opera cloak whose voluminous sleeves are only rivaled by a
mammoth plumed headpiece. On display beside the painting is the epic cloak
itself, representing one of a handful of reunions between artworks and the
garments featured in them. “It’s amazing to see how Sargent rendered that
taffeta and how he arranged the cloak in a different way than it would fall
naturally,” says Hirshler, noting how the artist turned a side of the garment
outwards to expose its dramatic pink lining.
The
second gallery, designed to evoke Sargent’s Tite Street studio in London,
focuses on his preference for painting sitters clad in black or white. The
theme carries through to the subsequent gallery, “The Art of Dress,” where
three stunningly preserved 19th-century gowns from the MFA’s collection are on
view. They belonged to Mrs. Sarah Choate Sears, an influential Boston painter,
photographer, and collector who was good friends with Sargent. Rather than
paint her in the sapphire silk-velvet walking dress or chartreuse silk-damask
Worth gown, each reflecting her penchant for rich color, Sargent intentionally
immortalized her in white. So, too, did he often opt for more informal-looking
clothes—think the iconic Dr. Pozzi in his fiery red dressing gown and Turkish
slippers—compared to a sitter’s very finest threads.
Starkly
contrasting Sargent’s fondness for black and white, however, is 1892’s Mrs.
Hugh Hammersley, one of several prized works from The Metropolitan Museum of
Art. When the painting debuted at London’s Royal Academy that same year,
viewers were appalled by the bold magenta hue of the sitter’s velvet dress. “I
think what the critics struggled with was how to reconcile the modernity and
fashionability of this dress with Sargent’s ambitions and his sitters’
ambitions in the canon and lineage of great portraiture,” James Finch, Tate
Britain’s Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art, said during the
“Fashioned by Sargent” press preview. “The critics would say that a painting
like this will never last beyond the year…once fashions change.” More than a
century later, however, these critics must stand corrected.
A small
but mighty highlight of the show is a fragment of the velvet used in Mrs. Hammersley’s
dress, accompanied by a note from the sitter’s sister commemorating the
sitting. “There’s a tangible emotional connection to these clothes. The people
don’t survive, but some of the garments do,” says Hirshler, who is fascinated
by the sentimentality of clothing such as wedding dresses, and textiles saved
by families for generations. “The garments remind exhibition visitors that
these were real people.”
Sargent
further defies convention in the following gallery, which features portraits
that referenced, through dress, changing social norms during the late 19th
century. “As women take on more prominent public roles, you can see aspects of
menswear that give them authority,” says Hirshler. For example, in the 1898
portrait of Miss Jane Evans, one of the few women ever to head a residential
house at Eton College (England’s esteemed all-boys boarding school, with alumni
ranging from Prince William and Prince Harry to George Orwell), her austere
black wool outfit bears a close resemblance to the business suits worn by the
male figures in Sargent’s surrounding portraits.
The
following gallery captures Sargent’s love of the performing arts. His circle
included actors, musicians, and dancers, whose costumes lent them entirely new
personas. Two of the most striking painting-and-garment pairings in the show
are 1890’s La Carmencita, of Spanish-style dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, seen
alongside her glittering yellow ensemble, and 1889’s Ellen Terry as Lady
Macbeth, presented with her iridescent costume, adorned with hundreds of beetle
wings. These knockouts pave the way for arguably the artist’s most famous
painting, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), whose plunging neckline
scandalized the 1884 Paris Salon and prompted his move to London. (Originally,
Sargent had gone even further, painting her right strap sliding off her
shoulder.) That iconic portrait leads the “Fashioning Power” section, which
delves into sartorial signifiers of ancestral and national power, as well as
Sargent’s subtle allusions to past masters including Rembrandt and Velázquez.
Still, “Sargent’s paintings are absolutely portraits of their moment,” says
Hirshler, chiefly owed to his daring and singular sartorial direction.
The
final gallery marks Sargent’s departure from formal portraiture, which he’d
largely abandoned by 1907. And yet, even in more candid or pastoral scenes,
such as a series of paintings depicting his family in the countryside, fabric
consumes the compositions. In other works, women are wrapped in cashmere
shawls, popular in the early 19th century before largely falling out of favor.
The exhibition includes an extant example from Sargent’s personal prop
collection, deliberately laid out so that viewers can get lost in its
drapery—much like Sargent, in fact, who relished in the technical challenge of
capturing a textile’s dimensionality. “He separates himself from the
fashionable, yet he never loses interest in painting cloth,” says Hirshler. In
other words, you can take Sargent out of fashion, but you cannot take the
fashion out of Sargent.
In John
Singer Sargent’s Sumptuous Portraits, the Fashion Comes First. By Stephanie Sporn. Vogue,
October
11, 2023
In the
Art Institute of Chicago, there’s a portrait by the Edwardian artist John
Singer Sargent of an extraordinarily commanding woman. She stands very upright,
one hand on a pink silk armchair, the other on her hip. Her lips are full, her
red hair is loosely piled up, and light ripples from a peach and silver wrap.
The more closely you look, the more this compelling figure appears to dissolve
into loose brushstrokes, a zigzagging tracery of creamy pink and soft smoky
gray.
This is
the mezzo-soprano and society hostess Mrs. George Swinton, known as Elsie, and
the great-grandmother of the actor Tilda Swinton. Elsie was born in Saint Petersburg,
Russia, where Swinton would later film scenes for Sally Potter’s 1992 epic,
Orlando. Though Elsie’s position in society prevented her from becoming a
professional opera singer, she was described by the composer Ethel Smyth in
1940 as “my favourite vocalist.” She hosted a salon in London with the composer
Gabriel Fauré and was painted by Walter Sickert as well as Singer Sargent.
When
Swinton was growing up in rural isolation in 1970s Scotland, two Sargent
drawings of this glamorous forebear hung behind the television, eyebrows raised
in distinctly saucy challenge, an antidote to the conventional entertainment on
the screen below. “She was my North Star,” Swinton remembered. “The
self-possession she represented, the glamour of her independence, just lit me
up and anchored me down.”
The
power of this particular North Star never dimmed. Elsie is the presiding spirit
for Swinton’s latest collaboration for W with the photographer Tim Walker and
the creative director Jerry Stafford. For the past 12 years, the trio has been
meeting around the world for inventive shoots inspired by films and artists,
drawing on a deep well of shared obsessions that run from female Surrealists
such as Lee Miller and Leonora Carrington to the poet Edith Sitwell (who, as a child,
had been Elsie’s bridesmaid) to Nicolas Roeg’s alien masterpiece, The Man Who
Fell to Earth. “It’s always characters for Tilda to draw on,” Walker explained
in his studio, in East London. They’ve traveled together to Iceland; to the
Menil Collection, in Houston; and to Las Pozas, Edward James’s idiosyncratic
sculpture garden in the rainforest in Mexico.
The
latest project came much closer to home. In the damp dog days of summer,
Walker, Swinton, and a close knot of collaborators went to a country house in
Scotland. They used the walled gardens as a magically sleepy backdrop for
imaginary scenes that riff on Swinton’s family history. In the greenhouses and
vegetable beds, they created a gallery of figures who could have stepped
straight from a Sargent painting, trailing stoles, their stockings gleaming.
Sargent’s
portraits had long fascinated Swinton. She was drawn to the intensity of his
sitters’ self-presentation, their capacity to look back fiercely at the viewer
in a way that half conceals the precarity of their position, at the edge of a
century and a whole way of life. “The level of dignity—however hard-won—and,
with it, a sense of representing a community of people living similar,
extinction-threatened lives at a time that must have been vibrating with
tension and defiant self-definition: This moves and intrigues me deeply,” said
Swinton. She and Walker quickly moved away from precise art-historical
reproduction, slipping instead into “a sort of instinctive detective trail on
the scent of atmosphere, attitude, and experience—and, as is almost always the
most interesting, the unsaid.”
In
previous shoots, Swinton had been alone or accompanied by friends, but this
time the cast list included her two children, twins Xavier and Honor, now 25.
In a meadow starred with oxeye daisies, Swinton and Honor manifest long-dead
ancestors, sprawling amid a summery litter of discarded books and parasols, the
last gasp of the 19th century trapped by the camera’s fish-eye gaze. Swinton
resurfaces in the guise of a heavily rouged dowager, brandishing a freshly dug
beetroot and peering beadily through a beekeeper veil. Xavier, meanwhile, dons
his great-great-grandfather’s heraldic uniform as Lord Lyon King of Arms.
The
project was intensely personal, a way for Swinton and her children to reckon
with their ancestors by temporarily embodying them. As an actor, Swinton has
always possessed an uncanny ability to shift age and gender, her pale face
subtly reassembling itself in a multiplicity of forms. Call it the Orlando
trick, birthed while she was playing Virginia Woolf’s gender-fluid hero/heroine
and refined ever since, though never in such an intimate context. Here she
embodies male as well as female members of her family tree, reincarnating as
mustached old generals, fey artists, and decaying society beauties swathed in
layers of pearly fabric so no inch of unpowdered skin could be seen.
Elsie
was by no means the only long-dead relative to have been part of Swinton’s
daily life in childhood, gazing from paintings and looking back from mirrors.
“My brothers and I grew up shoulder to shoulder with related ghosts and their earthly
remnants. Our ancestors were a special part of the playground of our lives,”
she said. Her father would casually leave old family diaries at the end of the
dining room table after breakfast, in case any of his four children were
interested. When she was 16, Swinton came across one written by a teenage
female ancestor 100 years earlier.
Swinton
became “absorbed in her account of any number of repeated days: ‘Took the trap
into the village (two and a half miles away). Played croquet with George. Papa
read Ivanhoe. Finished my sampler.’ ” It came at a time in Swinton’s life when
she was developing a powerful vision of her own very different future, one that
would include art-making and travel, and especially “finding the nourishing
companionship of an unrelated tribe of my own full-strength, moon-age
daydreaming.”
The
diary was a warning of sorts: Don’t get trapped. Elsie, meanwhile, offered
encouragement to seek a wider and wilder life. “She was maybe my first
experience of the company of artists, the universe of fellowship I was looking
for, the kinship of vagabonds and freaks,” said Swinton. “That she was present
through all those somewhat desultory moments in school holidays, when I was so
open and searching for renegade kinship, meant more than I can say.”
The
escape hatch she longed for was opened by the artist and filmmaker Derek
Jarman, a liberatory figure for a whole generation of vagabonds and freaks.
They met in 1985, when Swinton answered a casting call for his film Caravaggio.
Jarman welcomed her into his flat on Charing Cross Road with his camera already
rolling. From that moment on, Swinton found a parallel and lifelong home in the
anarchic world of queer art-making.
Jarman
was the ringmaster of a strange circus, and his skills of experimentation and
play continue to inform Swinton’s work today. One of several long-term
collaborators on this shoot was the costume designer Sandy Powell, whom Swinton
first met when they both worked on Caravaggio. Despite her Hollywood credentials,
Powell is a master of the shoestring illusion. Witness the Edwardian belle
posing, modestly gloved and veiled, in an empty polytunnel, its curved plastic
roof admitting a wash of cool gray light. What looks like historically accurate
costume, composed of acres of white tulle perhaps found in a trunk in a family
attic, is constructed entirely from assorted sheets of plastic.
One of
the most compelling images shows Swinton as a soldier, lying on the earth in
what appears to be a glass coffin. It’s a melancholy update on her 1995
installation, The Maybe, in which she lay in limbo in a glass case for seven
days—though, in this instance, the coffin turns out to be a discarded cold
frame, used for protecting plants from the weather. Surrounded by heaps of
tiger lilies, this anguished figure in his greatcoat looks like a rural
memorial to the fallen. There’s intense contrast between the ceremonial heft of
military wear, with its shining gold buttons and elaborate frogging, and the
sober, troubled human inside, clutching a cap with bony, aging hands.
Though
the mood on the shoot was decidedly merry, Swinton and her children experienced
an uncanny sense of being inhabited by “certain emotions and attitudes outside
of our conscious choice” while the photographs were taken. When Swinton saw the
image of the soldier in the glass case, she immediately recognized her late
father, who’d served as major general in the Household Division and lost a leg
during World War II. It had unveiled something at once familiar and
unacknowledged: “a deep mourning and loneliness, the dignity of service
dispatched, and the humility of taking his place, at last, in the long line of
the no longer upright,” she said.
The
final image in the series shows Swinton as a crone, her face wizened as an old
apple, her bearing regal. Her dress is naggingly familiar: sea blue, sea green,
tight-bodiced, and falling into flounces. It’s one of Powell’s costumes from
Orlando, worn at the moment when Orlando discovers she’s been officially
identified as female and so has lost her inheritance, along with what Swinton
emphatically described as “all her independent social agency.” “It was the last
picture we did, just before the light went,” Walker added, though this doesn’t
quite explain the figure’s portentous mood.
Inheritance
can be a heavy burden. We all come trailing ghosts. If a novel as fluid and
encompassing as Woolf’s Orlando can be boiled down to a single message, it’s
about how to dance to the music of time, how to discard the stubborn and
sometimes deforming weight of the past and step instead into the ecstatic
uncertainty of the present. Something of this weird magic seems to have
accompanied Swinton’s own dance with time.
“For my
children and me,” she said, “this stepping into and moving through shapes made
by our ancestors has been peculiarly cathartic and empowering.” Stepping back
was a way to step forward, a liberating move in a complicated gavotte. She
hopes so, anyway. “The tracing of past iterations and inhabitations has, maybe,
offered us to the present, having had the opportunity to be somehow exorcised
and integrated, and, with our fingers crossed, capable of representing
evolution.”
Tilda
Swinton Channels Her Ancestors in a John Singer Sargent–Inspired Fashion
Fantasy. By Olivia Laing. Photographs by Tim Walker. W Magazine, October 4, 2023.