Fashioned by Sargent
Reviewed by Gretchen SinnettGretchen Sinnett
Associate Professor, Art + Design
Salem State University
Email the author: gsinnett[at]salemstate.edu
Citation: Gretchen Sinnett, exhibition review of Fashioned by Sargent, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 23, no. 1 (Spring 2024), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2024.23.1.20.
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Fashioned by Sargent
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
October 8, 2023–January 15, 2024
Sargent and Fashion
Tate Britain, London
February 22–July 7, 2024
Catalogue:
Erica E. Hirshler, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, James Finch, Pamela A. Parmal, eds.,
Fashioned by Sargent.
Boston: MFA Publications, 2023.
248 pp.; 150 color illus.; notes; list of illustrations; contributors; index.
$65.00 (hardcover)
ISBN: 13: 978–0878468942
Lately I sometimes wonder, when it can feel like the world is burning, whether John Singer Sargent’s (1856–1925) artwork is still relevant for my students, most of whose lives seem very far removed from the world of luxury, privilege, and grace he so seductively conjured. Fashioned by Sargent, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offered a resounding yes. The show revealed Sargent’s creative use of fashion to construct some of his most compelling portraits and offered the rare opportunity to see pictures from the MFA and Tate Britain, two of the most important custodians of the artist’s work, as well as other collections, together with dazzling period clothing and accessories, in some of which sitters posed. Created by scholars of painting and fashion arts, the exhibition could be enjoyed simply for the sheer visual spectacle of Sargent’s virtuoso technique and the fine workmanship of sumptuous gowns and accessories, on and off canvas, as well as the opportunity to see works like Madame X, Dr. Pozzi at Home, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, and Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, to name just a few, in one place (figs. 1, 2, 3, 4).[1] But the exhibition and its catalogue are also part of ongoing scholarly explorations of the complex power dynamics within the practice of portraiture. And while, in recent years, scholars have fruitfully explored the ways in which sitters have maintained their agency in relation to artists, Fashioned by Sargent focused on the power of the portraitist and to a lesser extent those who publicly responded to his works. The exhibition also examined how Sargent’s portraits, and period responses to them, addressed gender and sexual identities, questions of center and periphery, and public discourse about private citizens, certainly all twenty-first century concerns.
A dramatic black satin curtain, pulled up to reveal the exhibition title on a salmon pink wall, greeted visitors as they approached the exhibition, previewing the curators’ argument that Sargent was akin to a director staging sitters’ performances and alluding to the artist’s love of painting black fabric (fig. 5). A timeline across from the gallery entrance referenced key works and Boston area commissions and reproduced period fashion plates, demonstrating the changing silhouettes for women’s fashion during Sargent’s lifetime but also subtly setting up a contrast with the portraits waiting within the Ann and Graham Gund Gallery (fig. 6).
The exhibition began with a single portrait of Aline Sassoon and the black taffeta opera cloak, possibly designed by the House of Worth, in which Sargent pictured her (figs. 7, 8, 9). The pairing introduced one of the exhibition’s key themes: Sargent’s continuous transformation of his sartorial source material to create compelling personas and compositions. This vision contradicts accusations that have dogged Sargent for more than a century that he was simply transcribing reality or fawning over his clients. Wall labels and the audio guide focused attention on the way in which Sargent wrapped the normally loose garment around Sassoon and pinned back the opening to create a “sinuous line of pink from her head to her hands,” accentuating a portrait’s traditionally most expressive aspects. As visitors moved on, they were encouraged to consider how Sargent’s practice relates to self-fashioning in today’s image-saturated culture.
The doorway to the second gallery, “The Studio in Black and White,” was oriented so that Amalia Subercaseaux seemed to be looking over her shoulder into the first room, as if beckoning the visitor onwards (fig. 10). A large, paned lightbox occupied the wall to the right, part of an effort to “evoke an artist’s studio,” which was supported by a small photograph of Sargent’s Tite Street Studio and a reproduction of Max Beerbohm’s caricature of wealthy Londoners queueing outside his door (fig. 11). The gallery contained six portraits of sitters garbed primarily in the black and white fabric that Sargent often favored. Most of the works were from early in his career or from a new stage such as his first painting trip to the United States. Subercaseaux’s remembrance of the artist’s total control over the details of her portrait and his refusal to depict Eleanora Iselin in one of her chic Parisian gowns established Sargent’s iron grip over his clients from the beginning (figs. 11, 12). Édouard Pailleron’s bohemian outfit, a significant departure from how men of his social class were usually represented, demonstrated that the artist pushed sartorial boundaries with willing clients from the start (fig. 13). Wall texts, here and throughout the exhibition, helped visitors read some of the garments with period eyes. For example, Maria Davis’s black walking dress with appliqued bolero jacket, delicate white jabot, and ruffled skirt, which appears rather elaborate by today’s standards, was considered “appropriate for outdoor activities” (fig. 14).
The third section, “The Art of Dress,” focused on portraits of women and children, as well as three of Sarah Choate Sears’s beautifully preserved dresses from the House of Worth (figs. 15, 16). Viewers were asked to consider the way these garments—a sapphire blue walking dress, a chartreuse evening gown, and an elaborately beaded ivory gown—differed from the relatively simple white dress in which the artist pictured her. While the exhibition called attention to Sargent’s inventiveness, including his transformation of a bolt of fabric into Rachel Warren’s sketchy pink dress, a swatch of the velvet gown Mary Hammersley wore for her portrait revealed that he stayed true to his source material, in this case the glorious cerise color, when it served his goals (figs. 17, 18). As one moved through the exhibition, it became easier to spot the ways in which Sargent manipulated garments—for example, the seemingly arbitrary puff of white fabric cascading down the front of Helen Harrison’s dress that balances the flounces on the back of her cape (fig. 19).
This gallery provided the best opportunity to think about the materiality of clothing compared with its rendition on canvas, even though the exhibition did not include the actual garment in which Sears posed (if one even existed), unlike Lady Sassoon’s portrait in the first section and several others later in the exhibition. I was struck by the density and apparent weight of Sears’s beaded evening gown, sewn from bengaline, a “shiny, ribbed fabric made from silk or silk blended with cotton” (fig. 20). The wall text for this section quoted Archer Newland’s observation in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) that women use clothing as a type of armor. This gown, indeed, evoked armor, thanks in part to the care with which the garments were displayed, reinforced, as the audio tour explained, by appropriate period undergarments. Sargent’s magic was not just in the streamlining that sets his images apart from period fashion plates designed to highlight silhouettes and trimmings (we learned that the artist was no fan of the bulky bustle), but the apparent ease with which his sitters inhabit their clothing, free from the irritating reality of seams, fastenings, and undergarments.
The curators also addressed the costs of such clothing, noting that Sears likely paid $10,000 to $30,000 in today’s dollars for the bengaline gown and explaining that each of the faux pearl beads was individually attached, thus alluding to the skilled but likely low paid labor behind the glamor. This was one of several references to the workers who made these beautiful wardrobes possible, including Adèle Meyer’s co-authoring “a study about garment workers in London that called for an equitable minimum wage.” A bird of paradise aigrette, like the one worn by Mary Louisa Boit in her portrait, raised another kind of cost, fashion’s toll on the natural world (fig. 21). The clothing industry may have been slower in the bespoke era, but as with today’s fast fashion there was collateral damage. A reference, in the next section, to the top hat’s role in the decimation of the North American beaver population was a reminder that the environmental impact was not limited to women’s wear.
“The Art of Dress” also illuminated yet another potential cost when Sargent pushed fashion boundaries too far: negative critical responses, aimed as much at the sitter as at the picture. It wasn’t only the infamous Madame X, on stage later in the exhibition, that caused consternation (see fig. 1). As the wall labels helpfully stated, Isa Boit’s black and pink polka dot outfit was criticized as “showy” and “saucy,” and Helen Harrison’s portrait, in which she wears a curious cardinal red cloak over a lavender inflected white gown, was derided as “violently keyed” and appropriate to “convey her to the regions of Mephistopheles” (see fig. 19). We learned that the later criticism was likely directed as much at her role in her sister’s scandalous divorce proceedings as at Sargent’s palette. That both Boit and Harrison were friends of the artist likely contributed to their willingness to be shown in bold ensembles, but the negative criticism was a reminder that where publicly displayed portraits were concerned, there were never just two people in the room, no matter the intimacy of their relationship. Exhibition visitors and reviewers spoke their minds, sometimes as a means of policing social hierarchies and norms, certainly something familiar today.
Three sections of the exhibition occupied one gallery, and William Morris-style wallpaper marked the visitor’s passage to the next one, “Sporting with Gender,” which showed Sargent and some of his sitters testing the limits of gender conventions during a period when “traditional roles for the sexes were increasingly challenged.” While Gretchen Warren’s and Sarah Choate Sears’s respective identities as “a poet and a scholar” and “an accomplished painter and photographer” were highlighted in the wall labels, Sargent’s depictions of them ignore those accomplishments. In contrast, he presented his female sitters in this section, including writer Vernon Lee, art collector Alice Thursby, and Eton College official Jane Evans, as “New Women” (figs. 22, 23, 24). That Sargent showed Thursby “as if she was about to leap into action,” and Evans with a traditionally masculine hand on hip gesture, was a reminder that pose and costume fit like hand and glove in Sargent’s most compelling portraits. And the paintings selected for this gallery revealed how minutely calibrated those poses could be, with dandies W. Graham Robertson’s and Philip Sassoon’s elegantly splayed fingers registering quite differently than Evans’ sterner tucked fingers position (figs. 24, 25). The fact that Lee, Thursby, and Evans were all pictured in clothing derived from menswear raises questions, still relevant today, about the visual repertoire available to convey female accomplishment and authority.
Sargent’s large-scale portrait of Henry Lee Higginson, in which his “unobtrusive, loosely fitted, brown wool day suit” and mussed hair implied that he was not concerned with fashion, was installed so that he appeared to look skeptically across the room at W. Graham Robertson’s and the intimately attired Samuel-Jean Pozzi’s performances of less traditional masculinities (figs. 2, 22, 25). The contrast between the attenuated frame of Robertson, an illustrator and designer, and Higginson, a former soldier presented as a mountain of a man, is interesting in relation to the latter’s founding the Boston Symphony, suggesting that perhaps the interests of dandies and men who exhibited a more traditional masculinity were not as far apart as some would have liked.[2] Reference to Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency in conjunction with Robertson’s portrait served as a reminder that the cost for challenging some conventions could extend beyond bad press.
Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie, in which Sargent’s friend playfully masquerades as a male cavalier, served as a transition to the exhibition’s next section, “Portraiture and Performance,” which included pictures of professional performers as well as the artist’s friends enacting the period vogue for fancy dress (fig. 26). The visitor again had the opportunity to compare actual garments with their rendition on canvas, including the portrait of Carmen Dauset Moreno (La Carmencita) and her “tawdry” (according to Sargent) spangled costume (figs. 27, 28). The showstopping portrait of Ellen Terry in character as Lady Macbeth moored the gallery’s end wall along with Alice Laura Comyns-Carr’s shimmering “Beetle Wing Dress” and cloak in which the actor performed on stage and posed for Sargent (figs. 4, 29). Terry, whose crocheted dress evoked chain mail, seemed to look back down the room toward the feminine “armor” on display in “The Art of Dress.”
An unfinished portrait of one of the Javanese dancers (Javanese Dancer, 1889; private collection) who performed at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair and two of the fancy dress portraits in this section demonstrated the importance of colonialism in a period when many Europeans accepted it as the way of the world. Sargent’s attention to the unnamed dancer’s costume and gestures conveys respectful admiration, but his access to her performance was a result of Dutch control of Indonesia at the time. A portrait of writers Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (Frances Van de Grift Osbourne) (1885; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville), in which Osbourne wears what she described as “the robes (veritable) of an Indian princess,” and one of Almina Wertheimer, Ena’s sister, in a “pastiche of a Turkish coat, a turban decorated with pearls and a feather, and an Indian sarod” showed Sargent’s and his friends’ participation in what some today would criticize as cultural appropriation (fig. 30). While the curators argued that such dressing up was likely experienced as a form of play that fueled the writers’ creativity, they noted that Wertheimer’s portrait, certainly also playful, is more mysterious given that “Orientalist” stereotypes were commonly used to marginalize Jewish women at the time.
Sargent’s scandalous Madame X awaited visitors’ admiration in the next gallery, “Fashioning Power,” which explored the collaboration of Sargent and his sitters in fabricating various types of power—military, cultural, hereditary, and self-made, to name a few—bolstering their status through references to Old Master paintings in several cases (fig. 31). Sybil Sassoon’s and Mathilde Hirsch’s dresses both reference seventeenth-century Spanish royal portraits and assert their family’s power to own rare and luxurious objects, antique textiles in Hirsch’s case and historic jewels in Sassoon’s (figs. 32, 33). To the left as one entered the gallery, Sargent’s portrait of the Marquess of Londonderry and his nephew reenacting their roles in King Edward VII’s coronation was a grand demonstration of aristocratic power (fig. 31). At the opposite end of the gallery, Lady Helen Vincent’s portrait suggested that if a uniform makes the man, beauty makes the woman, an idea echoed by the pictures of Amélie Gautreau and Louise Inches (figs. 1, 34, 35). Vincent’s social power came not from supporting the crown, but her reputation as “the prettiest woman in England” (fig. 36). Meanwhile, Ellen Terry as the ferocious Lady Macbeth was visible through the doorway when one looked back, conveying quite a different kind of feminine power.
The portraits of British men in this section were all gleaming medals and gold braid, visually undergirding the power of empire. But if Sir Frank (Athelstane) Swettenham (1904; National Portrait Gallery, London), the High Commissioner of the Malay States, seems the picture of elegant aplomb, Colonel Ian Hamilton’s portrait, which one critic said, “might be labelled ‘Imperialism,’” perhaps hints at the cost of the imperial endeavor (although not likely the cost to the colonized) with a marked tension in his neck and hands and his heavy greatcoat dampening the exuberance of his jangling medals (fig. 37). In contrast, the large scale, but otherwise toned down, portrait of US citizen John D. Rockefeller (fig. 38) made me think of John Singleton Copley’s comparatively restrained picture of John Hancock (1765; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) on view upstairs, which Paul Staiti described as looking like “a minor trader” or “the house accountant”[3]; although the recent “stealth wealth” fashion discussion launched by the television series Succession might be an even better comparison. Sargent clearly cast Rockefeller, “a major philanthropist” at this point in his life, in the role of captain of industry rather than robber baron.
Once again, while Sargent’s portraits supported some hierarchies, they troubled others. The US-born Amélie Gautreau, whose dress was not much more revealing than that in the portrait of Louise Inches’s, on view nearby, “threatened to topple long-standing national hierarchies of fashion, society, and identity,” as she attempted to rise in French society, her ascent infamously stymied by the portrait’s disastrous initial reception (figs. 1, 39, 40). And Sargent’s bravura portrait of Adèle Meyer and her children, all pastel exuberance compared with the streamlined aesthetic of Madame X, prompted antisemitic responses (fig. 37). More amusing than troubling was a snarky comment in a private letter, of the type we might make in response to photographs on social media today, comparing Inches with the Biblical Judith (see fig. 35). (Was this meant as a back-handed compliment?)
After the weightiness of “Fashioning Power,” Sargent’s delicate portrait of Lady Agnew, displayed against a seafoam green wall, beckoned the visitor into the final gallery, “Outside Fashion,” which also included Sargent’s earlier portrait of his friend Lily Millet (figs. 41, 42). Although the pictures share “a delicacy, cool palette, and half-length format,” Millet leans forward as if about to share a confidence, and Agnew back, keeping us at a slightly bemused distance. The rest of the gallery was awash in sunlight, filled with the mostly smaller scale, plein air paintings that Sargent completed on holidays with family and friends (fig. 43). These works reveal Sargent’s love of painting scintillating effects of light on fabric, particularly white cloth. He repeatedly wrapped friends and family in a Kashmiri shawl, which was included in the exhibition, and a wide taffeta skirt that seemed to elicit bravura brushwork, visible in In a Garden, Corfu, and Nonchaloir (Repose) (figs. 44, 45, 46). The visitor could see Sargent’s facture loosening up to the point that fabric seemingly transforms into a landscape in Two Girls in White Dresses, which a critic described as a “liquefaction of clothes.” Freed from the strictures of commissioned portraiture, Sargent’s riot of brushwork began to overtake legibility in paintings like The Chess Game (fig. 44).
As visitors exited the exhibition space, four small display cases provided information about the exhibition’s creation from conservation, curatorial, design, and interpretation perspectives, part of the contemporary trend to make museums more transparent to the public (fig. 47). Additionally, a small display outside the conservation studios on the museum’s third floor featured one of the artist’s palettes and shared recent technical discoveries about several of the museum’s Sargent portraits (fig. 48).
The exhibition was accompanied by a beautifully illustrated catalogue, which includes seventeen scholarly essays, seven of which are fairly short explications of a single artwork. Most of these shorter essays focus on portraits of Sargent’s friends or sitters he pursued, suggesting that a previous level of trust with some sitters and strong visual interest in others led to particularly compelling compositions. As one would expect, the authors provide deeper forays into the themes raised in the galleries.
Several essays delve into the artist’s creative control of his sitters and his transformation of source material, whether it be clothing, Old Master paintings, or contemporary gender conventions. In “Sitting for Sargent,” the first essay in the collection, Richard Ormond recalls Sargent’s description of “the painting of portraits as a battleground” (15), and discusses several of the artist’s volleys, including rejecting clients’ choice of garments and improvising with bolts of fabric when the dress didn’t suit, or both in the case of Gretchen and Rachel Warren’s portrait (see fig. 21). He also explains some of the nuts and bolts of sitting for the artist and cites one client’s remembrance that the pins Sargent used to hold fabric in place “often pricked” (20), demonstrating one price sitters paid for Sargent’s illusion of sartorial ease.
If Sargent sometimes saw himself as a general, Erica E. Hirshler fruitfully positions him instead as a director eliciting compelling performances from his sitters in “Portraits as Performance.” Hirshler traces this tendency from the beginning of the painter’s career, when he cast Édouard Pailleron and his wife Marie (Marie Buloz Pailleron [Madame Édouard Pailleron], 1879; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) as a bohemian and Parisienne respectively, to the later scenes of friends and family lolling in alpine meadows. In between, she explores costume’s role in Sargent’s most theatrical and decadent portraits, including Dr. Pozzi at Home, Madame X, and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1888; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), and discusses portraits with fancy and cross-cultural dress (see figs. 1, 2). Her discussion of negative criticism of the sitters as well as the paintings suggests that while Sargent’s friends and clients may have been playing roles, viewers often responded as if the portraits were transparent. Perhaps this demonstrates how successfully Sargent helped his subjects to get into character.
Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Rebecca Hellen continue the theme of performance, in this case with an actual performer, in “Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth,” which spotlights the portrait and the shimmering “Beetle Wing Dress” and coordinating cloak that fill most of Sargent’s canvas (see figs. 4, 29). In this case, Sargent’s role as director was quite literal as Terry’s pose was not borrowed from her stage performance. After briefly discussing Alice Laura Comyns-Carr and Ada Nettleship, the costume’s creators, Corbeau-Parsons and Hellen analyze Sargent’s process and technique, with reference to conservation reports, including his decision to render the dress primarily in tones of blue rather than green. They note that the costume has traditionally been displayed on a mannequin posed after Sargent’s painting at Smallhythe Place, Ellen Terry’s house museum, demonstrating the portrait’s import for the actor’s legacy.
In “From Dress to Paint,” Anna Reynolds zooms back out and explores Sargent’s general approach to representing fashion, breaking it down into a process of selection, arrangement, and embellishment (a trio borrowed from Henry James’s response to impressionist art), through which he transformed the garments before him to match his vision for the sitter. She discusses this process, in which he often erred on the side of streamlining, in relation to key portraits from the first half of the exhibition, including Mrs. Adrian Iselin (Eleanora O’Donnell), Mrs. Edward Darley Boit (Mary Louisa Cushing), Lady Sassoon (Aline de Rothschild), and Mrs. Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) and Her Daughter Rachel (figs. 8, 12, 21). At the end of the essay, a comparison of Margaret Rotch’s evening dress in a portrait (Mrs. Abbott Lawrence Rotch [Margaret Randolph Anderson], 1903; private collection) with the actual item (Callot Soeurs evening dress, about 1900; Lawrence Greenough, London) demonstrates perhaps even more clearly than the portrait-gown pairings in the exhibition how transformative that three-part process could be.
Elizabeth Prettejohn, in “The Fashion in Old Masters,” explores Sargent’s skillful evocation of Old Master portraits to elevate his sitters. She argues that his wide-ranging and close study of earlier artists allowed him to evoke the “panache” of artists like Anthony van Dyck through luminous fabric, assured poses, and bravura brushwork, without directly copying their work (116). She points out that Sargent’s embrace of the Old Masters offered not only aesthetic value and prestige, but fit the busy portraitist’s need to work quickly. Prettejohn ends with a close reading of his picture of Adèle Meyer and her children, in which she convincingly argues that Sargent synthesized myriad Old Master precedents to create a compelling and original modern portrait (see fig. 37).
Other essays offer deeper contextualization of Sargent’s paintings within the world of nineteenth-century fashion, providing a fuller understanding of how viewers at the time would have seen the garments he evoked. In the catalog’s second essay, “Portraits as Fashion,” Caroline Corbeau-Parsons argues that the two art forms “became mutually reinforcing” as Sargent started his career (26). She explains some of the ways in which they were interwoven and how this affected his critical reception. Sargent’s ability to represent his clients as sartorially au courant contributed to his success during a period when fashion was increasingly key for establishing their social status. But this facility could also be a critical liability, with several reviewers dismissing his paintings as, in essence, technically superior fashion plates. If Henry James recognized that Sargent used fashion as a tool rather than being mastered by it, some members of the public could not seem to see beyond the clothing.
In “The Culture of Dress,” Pamela A. Parmal pulls back the curtain on the turn of the century fashion industry. She describes the process of collaboration between the client and dressmaker or tailor, which involved not only new garments but, in a period when fabric was expensive, repairing and updating clothing. One example from the exhibition was Louise Inches’s burgundy gown, which was later restyled and altered, perhaps for another wearer (see fig. 40). Parmal outlines the rise and business model of couture firms frequented by women like Inches, including the House of Worth, whose founder saw and marketed himself as an artist. The essay also helpfully explains some of the nuances and shifts in well-off women’s and men’s clothing during the period, for example the difference between the men’s day suit, which Henry Lee Higginson wears in his portrait, and frock coat and trousers (see fig. 22).
In “Sarah Choate Sears and Her Wardrobe,” Parmal and Erica E. Hirshler note that Sargent’s portrait of Sears, in which she wears a comparatively simple white dress, does not match what society columns and her surviving garments suggest was a more adventurous eye for fashion. They raise the question of whose taste the portrait reflects, arguing that Sears’s friendship with the artist likely meant that they collaborated on the decisions or that Sears, as a painter and photographer, had faith in her fellow artist’s vision, which may have involved playing off his earlier portrait of her daughter Helen (see fig. 15). Regardless of how closely a portrait matched a sitter’s actual wardrobe, Parmal and Hirshler outline the importance of fashionable dress to upper-class women from the United States, “seeking to overcome any impression that they were provincial” (188). In this essay and Parmal’s previous one, they argue that for potential clients who wanted a simple transcription of their fashionable wardrobes, Sargent might not have been their man.
James Finch’s essay, “Mrs. Hugh Hammersley,” describes mostly male critics’ negative responses to the bold cerise color of the sitter’s gown, connecting their reactions to perceptions of new synthetic fabric dyes as gaudy and concerns that a painter too focused on contemporary fashion wasn’t a serious artist (see fig 18). He explains that some critics also distrusted the “lively, restless quality of the portrait” (54), as well as the French stylistic elements in Sargent’s art. Finch argues that Sargent situated Mary Hammersley in a setting evocative of Old Master portraits to counter her bold gown, suggesting the artist’s awareness of the tightrope he and his sitter walked in terms of balancing modernity and tradition.
The concern that Mary Hammersley’s portrait was too French points to another theme in the catalogue, how Sargent’s border crossings affected his art and its reception. In “Transnational and Transatlantic,” Andrew Stephenson convincingly argues that Sargent’s success rested on his ability to read differing moods in France, Britain, and the United States, but his transnational exhibition practice and reputation necessitated a delicate balancing act. For example, his success in Britain depended in part on his recognition of the more restrained sartorial tastes there, but when Sargent exhibited the same paintings in different countries the critical responses could diverge. For example, his Portrait of Carolus-Duran (Charles-Émile-Auguste Durand) (1879; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown) was praised for pushing sartorial boundaries in Paris, while a US critic derided the artist’s ensemble as “effeminate” (62). Stephenson explains that couturiers faced similar challenges in satisfying their cosmopolitan clients.
Erica Hirshler also briefly addresses how nationalism affected the response to Sargent’s works in “Portraits as Performance.” She notes that the medal Sargent received at the 1881 Salon for his portrait of the Chilean Amalia Subercaseaux (see fig. 10) was transferred to his portrait of the French Pailleron Children (1880; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines), a move spearheaded by their father Édouard, who was offended at Salon authorities honoring a portrait of a “foreign-born Parisienne” (79). And Stephanie L. Herdrich, in “Madame X,” explores the infamous and oft-discussed controversy over Sargent’s portrait of Amélie Gautreau from the angle of artist’s and sitter’s shared social positions as “upstart Americans infiltrating Parisian society and usurping attention from their French counterparts” (35). Herdrich argues that for French viewers the fallen shoulder strap revealed the outsider Gautreau’s lack of taste, signaling that this professional beauty could never truly become a Parisian insider (see fig. 1). A United States critic, meanwhile, was outraged by the fallen strap’s implication that Gautreau was not wearing the usual undergarments.
Other essays explore how Sargent leveraged costume to fashion a range of gender identities. In “Sporting with Gender,” Paul Fisher discusses how, during a period of social anxiety around the erosion of traditional male and female roles, some of Sargent’s portraits challenged gender and sexual binaries, but not always as might be expected. For example, the portraitist pictured Philip Sassoon, who was known for his sartorial exuberance, in a rather restrained ensemble. Fisher points out that with Sargent it isn’t always the costumes but rather sitters’ poses and attitudes—how they wear the clothing—that conveys a rejection of traditional gender norms; for example, Betty Wertheimer’s “swagger and direct gaze” in the double portrait with her sister Ena (see fig. 14) or Sassoon’s “beringed hand, resting on his hip” (138, 141) (see fig. 22). In contrast, the Chesterfield coat in Sargent’s portrait of W. Graham Robertson was key for Sargent’s vision of the young designer as an aesthete-dandy, with Sargent quipping, “The coat is the picture” (139) (see fig. 25). A seasoned professional, Sargent also readily provided more traditional models of masculinity, as for example in his portrait of Henry Lee Higginson (see fig. 22), although interestingly Fisher notes that the sitter and his wife were reportedly unhappy with the painting.
Two other essays explore Sargent’s divergence from traditional models of femininity. In “The New Woman,” Frances Fowle discusses portraits that track with late nineteenth-century depictions of increasingly liberated young women. Fowle reads Sargent’s portrait of Alice Thursby (see fig. 22), in which the sitter’s active pose augments her “practical daywear,” through this lens, and explores some of the nuances in how Sargent represented independent young women (46). For example, Ena and Betty Wertheimer’s German Jewish identity, which led to marginalization, also freed them from some of the British aristocracy’s rules of deportment (see fig. 14). Fowle’s discussion of the portrait of Helen Harrison, whose reputation was marred by her sister’s scandalous divorce, is in some ways the most interesting (see fig. 19). Sargent balanced Harrison’s bold cape with a demure white dress and a pose that was much more reticent than the other “independent” women discussed in the essay, suggesting he registered the delicacy of her social situation.
In “Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie,” Andrew Stephenson analyzes Sargent’s second portrait of Wertheimer (see fig. 26), in which she energetically sports a man’s “ceremonial court coat and makeshift cavalier accessories” (147). Stephenson explains that while some critics praised the portrait’s “vitality,” others denigrated Wertheimer as a “hoyden,” and classes the latter response with critics’ projection of stereotypes about Jewish women’s inappropriate boldness onto some of Sargent’s other portraits (148). Stephenson believes that Wertheimer’s portrait, which her father commissioned as a wedding gift, was particularly troubling because of the way Sargent appropriated aristocratic, traditionally masculine clothing and accessories for a playfully gender bending image that pushed the boundaries of wedding and other upper-class portraits.
Stephenson’s discussion of Wertheimer’s portrait, Herdrich’s of Madame X, and two of the catalogue’s other short essays reveal how Sargent’s portraits illuminate tensions around who was in the center and who was on the periphery of society. In “Almina Wertheimer,” Caroline Corbeau-Parsons argues that Sargent’s portrait of Ena’s younger sister (see fig. 49) dressed in a Turkish entari while playing an Indian sarod “cannot help raising uncomfortable questions of cultural appropriation,” but was not traditionally Orientalist or antisemitic in intent (128). She notes that the painting lacks the lascivious mood and exposed skin characteristic of typical Orientalist works, and that Sargent’s depiction of his niece Rose-Marie Ormond and another friend in the entari, which was part of his costume collection, suggests that he did not associate the garment with the trope of Jewish woman as exotic “other.” Similarities between this portrait and one by Joshua Reynolds recently stolen from Almina’s uncle provide another possible, but still somewhat mystifying, explanation for Sargent’s and Wertheimer’s collaborative game of dress up.
If the Wertheimers and Gautreau occupied liminal social positions, Thomas Lister, another one of the sitters Sargent pursued, had been born to the center, and Dominic Green argues, in “Lord Ribblesdale,” that Sargent offers a “subtle portrait of aristocracy in a time of change” (198). Green’s complex reading focuses on the decision to picture Ribblesdale in his everyday hunting garb (see fig. 50), self-consciously evocative of the earlier Georgian era, rather than livery associated with a royal office he had held, as initially planned. Green convincingly argues that the costume, including the red-tipped whip, was key for a portrait that seems to depart from traditional aristocratic expressions of power, in line with Lister’s Liberal political activities during an increasingly democratic age, while also upholding that hereditary power. Ultimately, Sargent glorifies but also perhaps subtly undercuts his literally and figuratively towering subject.
The catalogue concludes with Elaine Kilmurray’s essay, “A Riot of White,” which addresses Sargent’s artistic engagement with the color, starting with his assertion that the color rather than the subject was the starting point for Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris) (1880; Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown). Sargent often dressed clients in white for formal portraits, and Kilmurray discusses the human costs of the production and care of white cloth with its aura of innocence, luxury, or spirituality. She argues that Sargent’s passages of white paint always read as brushstrokes as well as fabric, with the balance tipping far toward the former in later works like Two Girls in White Dresses, in which his luxurious facture trumps the materiality of the cloth and the figures within (see fig. 44). The essay is a fitting conclusion to the catalogue, demonstrating that for Sargent, painting fabric was never just about showing a sitter to best effect, but always also about the act of creation.
Notes
[1] Museum visitors who arrived in costume speak to the success of this aspect of the exhibition as perhaps do the gleeful cries of, “It’s Billie Eilish! It’s Billie Eilish!” I heard in front of the portrait of Elsie Palmer (fig. 51) (The resemblance is uncanny.) A. Z. Madonna, “Museumgoers dress to impress at MFA’s ‘Fashioned by Sargent,’” The Boston Globe, January 4, 2024, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/04/arts/museumgoers-dress-impress-mfas-fashioned-by-sargent/?p1=BGSearch_Overlay_Results [login required]. The exhibition was very crowded both times I attended despite a timed ticket entrance, which likely deterred some visitors from accessing the labels; however, the interpretive decision to feature only nine works on the audio guide likely helped the flow of visitors through the galleries.
[2] Sargent’s own social position would certainly have made him particularly attuned to such nuances. As James Finch and Erica Hirshler note in the catalogue, “His subversion of gender codes and conventions is related both to his perspicacity of vision and to the deliberate ambiguity of his sexuality and the homosexual and homosocial circles in which he often moved” (9). For an in-depth discussion of the way Sargent moved between different worlds, see Paul Fisher, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).
[3] Paul Staiti, “Character and Class,” in John Singleton Copley in America, exh. cat. Carrie Rebora, Staiti, et. al. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), 71.