favereys: John Singer Sargent And Fashion

21/01/2024

John Singer Sargent And Fashion

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.

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.

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John Singer Sargent And Fashion

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