Imagine the cultural beginnings of the Bel Epoque in the City of Light. Then conjure a painter who possessed all the qualities of a true bon vivant– youthful charm, sophistication, good looks, and bold ambition. Such accolades are startling considering they defined a precocious 18-year-old American who managed in one extraordinary decade (1874 to the mid-80s) of his stay to create portraits and figure studies to dazzle the harshest critics of the Paris Salon.
For the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has cleverly amassed a portrait of the artist during his nascent and brilliant Paris years. It was there that John Singer Sargent’s early career culminated with the debut of his infamous portrait of Madame X. The Louisiana-born Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau (1859–1915) was known in Parisian society as a self-created work of art. There is an element of shock in her chalk-white countenance and blasé pose. With her own complicity, and the fact it was a non-commissioned portrait, Sargent felt free to show the right strap of her gown slipping from her shoulder. Ridiculed in certain circles at the Salon of 1884, it was nevertheless a scandalous success.
Sargent did assent to put the strap back in place but kept the painting for 30 years before selling it to the Met. He considered it one of his very best. As the central core of the exhibit, its importance is further enhanced by a number of studies preceding the finished work. Some of these are just as delightfully riveting, as he was a prolific sketch artist, as well as a master watercolorist.
Portraiture among Sargent’s contemporaries reflect the prevailing style in fashion and manners. They also make clear how integral they were to the young artist’s development. La Parisienne by Edouard Manet (ca. 1876) is a perfect example. The older painter was an obvious inspiration for emerging Impressionists and others. Another example on display is James McNeill Whistler’s Lady Meux (1881-1882). Such works highlight the auspicious play of darks and lights that Sargent employed in so many of his portraits.
Man Wearing Laurels (1874-80) was created under the tutorship of Sargent’s favorite teacher of portraiture, Carolus Duran. According to Sargent, Duran insisted that “First you classify the values. Then you work from the middle tone up toward the lights and down toward the darks.” There are countless examples on view that show Sargent’s mastery of this maxim. Little surprise that the same instructor stressed such contrasts in compositions by Degas and Velasquez.
No better example of Sargent’s mastery of group portraiture can be seen than in The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). It’s a vast interior landscape, with the four Boit sisters in the entrance hall of their Paris apartment. Henry James, a fan of Sargent’s work, found it “a happy play-world” but the shadowy corners suggest a darker complexity. It is displayed with Sargent’s Las Meninas, After Velásquez (1879, which reveals his debt to Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), whose paintings Sargent copied while at the Prado Museum during an artistic pilgrimage to Madrid.
Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881) gives us a renowned surgeon, aesthete and collector, portrayed convincingly in his vivid red dressing gown, suggesting a Renaissance-style dandy. The painting brings to mind the same audacity found in Madam X. Both subjects seem to express a penchant for role-playing, an aristocratic quality at full tilt in Sargent’s hands.
Vernon Lee (1881) warrants a second look. Violet Paget was a feminist, an art historian, and a writer on art and travel. An early gender rebelliousness is reflected in her masculine pen name and androgynous dress. A childhood friendship with Sargent continued through his Paris years. His portrait of her demonstrates a “caught on the fly” immediacy. The painting was said to have been completed in three hours.
Sargent was a passionate traveler. Examples of portraiture and landscape are present from Spain, Morocco, Venice, Maine, and other locales. In the 19th century, Capri became a summer hotspot for the artistically inclined. The island’s whitewashed architecture and dazzling light provided the challenge of white-on-white compositions. Easy to miss among the larger, formidable portraits on view is Staircase in Capri (1878), which captures the charm of such a technique in its simple subject.
Another favorite of this reviewer is A Gust of Wind (Judith Gautier) from the same year. Its subject, Judith Gautier (1845–1917), was a notable figure in Paris literary and artistic society. The daughter of French poet, writer, and art critic Théophile Gautier, she entertained writers Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire at the family home. Sargent sketched a series of images of her during a visit to the French countryside in summer 1883. The most progressive and enchanting of these shows Gautier in a pose of lovely spontaneity. One can easily imagine the seductive breezes billowing about her costume, situated as she is on a hilltop under a perfect cobalt blue sky. It also demonstrates Sargent’s early practice with Impressionism.
Sargent’s fellow artist, Edward Burne-Jones, an influential figure during Sargent’s long years as an expatriate Londoner, had a different opinion about the parameters of portrait painting. “The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything temporary, fleeting, accidental.” Yet Sargent repeatedly demonstrated an exuberance and vulnerability in his subjects that shine through any pretense.
One might say that John Singer Sargent was a man with one foot in the 19th century and another in the 20th. A later exhibition in the 1980s of Sargent's previously hidden male nudes have sparked a reevaluation of his life and work. In addition to the beauty and innovation in his oeuvre for his time, his unconventional friendships with women and engagement with race, gender nonconformity, even his globalism, may just make him the man for this moment.
(John Singer Sargent and Paris runs through August 3, 2025.)
Author Bio:
Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief art critic.
For Highbrow Magazine
--All images courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.