sargent’s exquisite portraits-- 5/10/24

10 May 2024

sargent’s exquisite portraits-- 5/10/24

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Today's selection -- from Fashioned by Sargent by Erica E. Hirshler and others. The incomparable portraits of the American expatriate artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925):

“Sargent’s success built on demand for his portraits from a growing cosmopolitan clientele primarily based in France, Britain, and the United States. The early reception of Sargent’s work was complicated by his American nationality and his expatriate European existence. It was Sargent’s Parisian training, from 1874 to 1877, that allowed French critics to claim him as one of their own, comparing Sargent’s early works with paintings by leading French academic painters, notably his teacher Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, and to Edouard Manet. For their part, some English critics berated Sargent’s Francophile technique as a sign of his disengaged cosmopolitanism — ‘the French method as earned by a cleaver foreigner’ — while American critics positively evaluated his work as ‘French through and through,’ befitting an expatriate painter of the Franco-American school. Sargent’s artistic afflictions and his work’s national identity became particularly contested in the late 1880s, as his career extended to the United States at a time when that nation was mounting an imperial challenge to Britain and France, with growing cultural aspirations. As portraiture was being updated to fit the contemporary tastes and fashion sense of plutocratic elites, Sargent’s East Coast sitters were eager to be depicted as distinctively American, although captured in a sophisticated French manner that registered their individuality and modernity. At the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, when Sargent was placed alongside James McNeill Whistler as the cofounder of a modern American school, his work’s French styling was re-evaluated by American cultural nationalists as both the hallmark of a cosmopolitan luminary and the emergence of an eclectic and independent American art.

“Following his Parisian art training, Sargent exhibited a portrait of his teacher Carolus-Duran at the 1879 Salon to great success. He also cultivated the expatriate American community in Paris as patrons alongside a circle of leading French artists and writers as Eduard Pailleron, whose portrait he painted in the same year. The French poet and playwright is depicted with his head and hands dramatically illuminated in a manner reminiscent of Diego Velazques or Frans Hals, both artists much admired by Carolus-Duran and Sargent. Pailleron wears working-class garb, described by his daughter as ‘un veston de travail et chemise de sioie ouverte’ — a work jacket and loose-fitting, crimson-edged, open silk shirt with sewn-in neck strings, in the Bohemian or Romanian style. Similar coats made out of moleskin or velour were worn by country laborers, and the shirt, though made of silk, is reminiscent of a traditional agricultural worker’s shirt or smock. Standing with his left hand on his hip and carrying a well-read book in his other hand, Pailleron’s studied air reinforces his status as a member of the Parisian intelligentsia. The finely judged characterization is sharpened by the astute observations of an expatriate artist, of how claims to bohemianism by a middle-class Parisian writer could be reinforced through sartorial appropriation. The traditional rural worker’s jacket and simple shirt not only signal the writer’s claimed proletarian affiliations, but also function as key components in the construction of the modern bohemian look.

“Following the bankruptcy of the leading French bank, the Union Generale, and the subsequent stock market collapse in February 1882, the decline of the French art market had dire consequences for artists. As Edouard Manet wrote to his fellow artist Berthe Morisot in March 1882, ‘ Business is bad. All these financial events have almost cleaned everyone out and painting is feeling the effects.’ Sargent was also affected by these events, lamenting in 1885, ‘since the last three or four years I have been more or less up and down of prosperity: just now I am rather out of favour as a portrait painter in Paris.’ Prompted by the positive reception of his recent work in London and encouraged by Henry Kames to relocate to England, Sargent moved to the British capital in the summer of 1886. Having exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor Gallery, and the Fine Art Society, and the recently formed New English Art Club, Sargent calculated that with the success of some recent ‘portraits done in England…There is perhaps more of a chance for me there as a portrait painter.’ The artist was aware that his Parisian training and French style, and his selection of the French Salon as his principal exhibiting forum, inflamed the prejudices of English critics, and he recognized that ‘ it will be a long struggle for my painting to be accepted.’

Mrs. William Playfair

“Adapting Sargent’s French painterly style to British aesthetic preferences was more than a matter of artistic technique. In 1885, Henry James had told Vernon Lee that Sargent knew that many of his English female sitters were worried lest he make them ‘too eccentric looking’ by London standards. The London Art Journal critic reviewing Sargent’s work at the 1886 Royal Academy summer exhibition echoed this concern, stating that ‘his colouring and composition are both eccentric,’ resulting in ‘a certain chic about his portraits.’ The elegant fashionability of Sargent’s French portraits needed to be reconfigured for London patrons, who expected their portraits to demonstrate greater restraint. English taste in dress was based in a self-conscious sense of occasion, and preferred a modern, understated elegance to what could be perceived as the overly ostentatious and fussy chic of the Continent. Nevertheless, the internationalization of the high-class fashion market in the second half of the nineteenth century, with Paris at its center, granted wealthy elites in Britain and the United States familiarity with the latest fashions from leading couture houses such as Worth, Paquin, Couvet, Pingat, Callot, and Poiret. Along with retail outlets in fashionable French resorts and on the Riviera, many Parisian couturiers also opened offices in London, while the London-based firms Lucile Ltv. and Redfern established branches in Paris.

“The English-born Charles Frederick Worth built his fashion house by courting aristocratic French, British, and Russian patrons and wealthy American buyers, tailoring the latest Parisian models to the varied tastes of his exclusive cross-Channel and transatlantic clientele. These national preferences informed Worth’s selection of materials, finishings, and accessories, as well as which historical designs and fabrics to use in the revival of seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century styles. For example, while Second Empire French courtiers favored Worth’s style tapissier (upholstery style), with its profusion of fabrics and elaborate trimmings, flounces, and decorations, aristocratic English women found it too ostentatious and overblown for British court etiquette, where an elegant formality prevailed. American patrons, by contrast, were sometimes more extravagant in accessories than their European counterparts, especially when sporting opulent jewelry as daywear rather than saving it for evening ensembles.

“When in 1887 Sargent exhibited Mrs. William Playfair at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition, the majority of English critics agreed that Sargent had successfully modulated his Continental portrait style and mitigated his ‘ eccentric manner’. The Saturday Review critic praised the portrait for making ‘ no resort to false, trickily-effective reliefs or mannered system of colouring.’ R.A.M Stevenson, in the Art Journal, commended Sargent for producing ‘ a portrait [that] lays itself open to little adverse criticism, even from those who do not sympathize with the painter’s style,’ and saw its positive reception as evidence that Sargent had ‘conquered the fresh country.’ In this portrait, Sargent demonstrates his recognition of the English preference for a more reserved form of presentation, deportment, and dress. The wife of a famous British obstetrician, Emily Kitson Playfair is depicted in a bejeweled pale yellow silk satin evening dress worn under a dark green fur-trimmed opera jacket, as if about to embark on a night out. She wears understated jewelry comprising a dragonfly hair ornament and ring on her left hand, and carries a feathered fan in her right hand and an evening bag in the other. English critics particularly complimented the elegant choice of costume and they praised Sargent’s skill in rendering its shimmering surfaces and subtle texture; in the periodical Academy, Claude Phillips applauded Sargent’s treatment of its colors, noting the ‘peculiar juxtaposition of the dark green mantle which half-covers the yellow-white satin of the lady’s dress. With the wine-colored background being something of a novelty.’ And the Saturday Review critic concluded that it was ‘the finest piece of painting in the Academy,’ congratulating Sargent’s portrait for its ‘quiet power of fascination,’ ‘the admirable relation of the figure to the background, [and] the finesse and brilliance of the flesh.’”