Rarely Seen Art Charts Sargent’s Love Affair with Spanish Culture

Sargent and Spain brings flamenco, the Prado, the Moors, and the Roma to Washington.

S argent and Spain, at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is the luscious, revelatory new exhibition looking for the first time at John Singer Sargent’s love affair with Spain and Spanish cultures. It’s luscious in that Sargent conveyed Spain’s hot exoticism. Sargent’s Spain has lots of trappings of Europe, but Sargent saw it as its own thing, or bundle of things: gypsies, now called the Roma, flamenco, potentate kings, ripening pomegranates on trees, Moorish architecture, and Moorish weather. Over 30 years, he made seven extended trips to Spain as well as about 220 paintings, drawings, and watercolors about Spain. Aside from Venice, no other place held his interest for so long and with so tight a grip.

It’s revelatory in that Sargent’s Spanish work has never been so well represented. Sargent and Spain shows about 120 works, mostly Sargents but also photographs of Spain and books about Spain that he collected. And the curators could not be more distinguished. Sarah Cash from the National Gallery has worked on Sargent for years, most impressively doing Sargent and the Sea years ago. Richard Ormond, Sargent’s great-nephew and a British art historian, and Elaine Kilmurray produced the magisterial, nine-volume catalogue raisonné of Sargent’s career. Visitors to the exhibition are in good hands. They’ve made a great show.

I’ll write today’s story and Saturday’s on Sargent and Spain, since I liked the show, I love writing about Sargent, and the National Gallery is looking exceptionally well these days.

It’s a miniature retrospective of Sargent presented via Spain’s emotional and aesthetic pull on him. There’s barely a whiff of the Gilded Age, no aristocrats, and if we see flashes of Madame X, they’re from stomping, leggy flamenco dancers rather than a strapless shoulder. El Jaleo, from 1882, all eleven feet of it, made Sargent the hot new art star in Paris. It’s a big enchilada of Sargent’s views of Spanish life, dress, and culture as well as the ultimate dance picture. It’s not in the show. Alas, it’s owned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and never leaves. How does Sargent and Spain cope?

Sargent went to Spain seven times, his first visit in 1879 as a 23-year-old, already well-known, Paris-based artist, and his last in 1912. He traveled all over the country with an initial concentration on royal Spain of the Golden Age, the Spain of the Escorial, El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez. Later, he covered Granada, Seville, and Córdoba — Moorish Spain but also the poorest part of the country. He visited Santiago de Compostela, Spain’s holiest spot, and Barcelona, its most modern. He spent time in Mallorca, too.

The show is perceptively organized. It’s mostly chronological, but as Sargent aged, his interests in Spain changed. In the first gallery, we see what propelled him to Spain on his first trip. Carolus-Duran was Sargent’s charismatic teacher who drilled into the savant a view of art history that was aesthetically ideological as well as succinct. “Look at Velázquez, look at Hals, but always go back to Velázquez, Velázquez, Velázquez.”

This is no disparagement of Hals, who painted Dutch character and corporeality in sweeps of paint. Velázquez, Philip IV’s court painter and the curator of the Spanish royal collections, painted with both restraint and sparkle. His subjects are lofty, and their costumes sparkle with dabs of paint. He paints broad, tonal passages, too. Subtle grades of one basic color endow his royals with an effortless elegance. They inhabit a special world. They dazzle, but it seems to come naturally to them.

Velázquez wasn’t much represented in Paris collections. He painted only about 250 works. Having spent his adult life working for Philip IV, most of his work was in Madrid. Sargent, itching to study Velázquez in depth, spent his first visit at the Prado, by the 1870s a museum. He copied works by Velázquez, and some of these copies start the show. He took a prodigy’s stab at Las Meninas, The Fable of Arachne, the figure of Apollo from The Forge of Vulcan, and Aesop, and he also copied work by El Greco and Goya. The gallery is painted burgundy, so the Sargents glow. Sargent’s looking at both composition and color, tackling complex color harmonies but also figures in space.

There are three Sargent portraits in the mix, and the choice tells us we’re in the hands of a master painter and master curators. A Spanish Woman is a bust portrait from 1879–80. She’s swarthy, even raw, and sexy. She’s no Hapsburg infanta. Then, facing each other across the gallery, are full-length portraits of Cecil Harrison from 1888 and Manuel Garcia from around 1905. Both are single figures set in dark, empty spaces, Harrison is a deep red, and Garcia is black. Both are confident and austere. Harrison was ten or eleven years old. He’s imposing, and Sargent’s prophetic. Harrison died a hero in the First World War. Garcia was a Spanish baritone and opera star aged 100 when Sargent painted him.

I’d quibble about tacking these portraits too closely with Velázquez. Sargent’s a Victorian, and Victorians do dark whether or not they’ve been to Spain. I look at the Harrison portrait and see the sobriety of George Frederick Watts. We see, though, without being banged over the head with it, that Sargent looks, processes, amalgamates, and does something that’s uniquely Sargent. He draws from Velázquez, and also from Goya, an ambiance, a suggestion, a soupçon.

I like the choice for a few reasons, all related to curatorial daring, in short supply these days. Harrison’s portrait belongs to the Southampton City Art Gallery in the U.K. It’s two bus fares from the U.S. Garcia’s portrait is at RISD in Providence. Both are off the beaten track and new to almost all visitors. That shows the curators know where the fresh meat is. Harrison’s a child and Garcia’s a centenarian, so there’s a frisson, an unexpected juxtaposition. Sargent, we see, doesn’t grab from Velázquez like a thug robs a CVS in Washington. He takes hints.

Sargent accessed Spanish culture not only through Carolus-Duran. In the 1870s, Paris experienced a spell of Hispanophilia, in avant-garde painting led by Manet, but stimulated also by a new, more establishment interest in Spanish Old Masters, Cervantes and Spain’s other picaresque writers, and Spanish sexual mores. Exploring Spain as an idea was a walk on the wild side. It was a romantic, otherworldly place that existed, or so many in Paris thought, not too far from the heyday of the Alhambra and Ferdinand and Isabella. It was a jumble and a contradiction. Men were bullfighters, women did the flamenco. The country was fiercely Catholic and priest-ridden but decadent. All of this was baked into Sargent’s thinking.

It’s helpful to remember who Sargent was, too. His parents were American. His father was an eye surgeon and the author of a standard book used by Union Army doctors in treating battlefield bullet wounds. His mother was from a prominent Philadelphia family. They were well-off — Sargent’s was a remittance family — but they weren’t rich. Before Sargent was born, his parents took their version of the European Grand Tour. Once there, his mother-to-be insisted she’d developed a menacing allergy to steam, like the kind steamships use, and since transatlantic rowboats weren’t an option, the Sargents could never go back, and never did.

Sargent was born in Florence but went to America for the first time when he was 21. He barely had a choice. Had he not gone, he would have lost his American citizenship. Another tidbit — from babyhood to adulthood, Sargent was rarely settled in one place. His parents were based, as a general proposition, in Paris but moved the family from city to city depending on where the social season happened to be. This made him the man he was: peripatetic, both cosmopolitan and catholic in taste, and with a tourist’s eye for subjects he found arresting but that the locals took for granted. Spain was, then, a place and idea open to Sargent. He was made to be open to it and to absorb it.

The next two galleries focus on Spanish dance. It’s a jump from the hierarchical, staid court of Philip IV but why not? We like surprises, not crazy ones, but surprises with purpose. And one surprise is seeing the show confront the thing that’s not there, and that’s El Jaleo. I’m not surprised they do it well. There’s a wall mural, not close to full-size, depicting El Jaleo and, below it, introducing Sargent’s infatuation with flamenco, acquired on his first Spanish trip. Sargent and Spain might not have gotten the painting itself, but the show got Sargent’s drawings for it, more than a dozen.

Jaleo means uproar, or ruckus, in Spanish. Unlike most dance performances, this brand of flamenco is immersive. The dancers perform, certainly, but the crowd does, too, not on the dance floor but through shouts and muffled moans. Sargent presents the dancers and musicians at the level of the viewer of the painting, not on an elevated stage. We believe we’re there.

The drawings of gestures as well as an exquisite watercolor of the main female figure basically provide an autopsy of the painting. It’s effective. By dissecting the picture and focusing on exaggerated gestures, we see how over-the-top both the final painting is and the flamenco experience was. The performance is a thing of extremes, too, from the pose of the dancing woman, her body seeming to thrust backward and forward at the same time, to background figures, some musicians, some spectators, looking as if they’re in a trance.

I didn’t miss El Jaleo, that big enchilada by the Fens. Even if the National Gallery could have blasted it out of the Gardner, it would have seemed too big, too choreographed, and too famous for the task at hand. It’s an immense studio picture, and most of the delights in Sargent and Spain are informal scenes of everyday life or on-the-spot still lifes. They show Sargent seeing and thinking on his feet. El Jaleo’s a showstopper done when Sargent was young, brash, and grabbing after the main chance.

The next gallery stars La Carmencita, from 1890, which belongs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, since the French consider Sargent to be French. It’s a portrait of a Spanish flamenco dancer Sargent saw not in Spain but in New York, where she had a long-running show at a music hall. He described her as “a bewildering, superb creature” and asked her to sit for him. It’s a big painting, and her sparkling dress, thick, white makeup, and haughty pose make an impression.

Though it’s front and center, commanding a wall and a vista from the exhibition’s entrance, the real attraction is The Spanish Dance, from between 1879 and 1882 and from the Hispanic Society. At 33 by 36 inches, it’s not small. It’s a depiction of a woman flamenco dancer performing in an exquisite night setting illuminated by what looks like fireworks. It looks less like a dance than a bacchanal. Also in the gallery is Sargent’s bust portrait of his artist friend Albert de Belleroche, painted in 1882 and belonging to the art museum at Colorado College. I’d never seen it. He’s dressed in vaguely Spanish style. Belleroche and Sargent studied together with Carolus-Duran. Like other informal Sargent portraits of friends, it’s fresh and playful.

On Saturday, I’ll write about Sargent’s Spanish landscapes, building studies, religious pictures, and views of the Roma. La Carmencita is Sargent’s last dance subject. He was peripatetic in his travels but also what he painted, obsessing over a topic for a while and then moving from it to something new.