Fashioned by Sargent Starts the New Year Dressed for Success

Ladies go first in a two-part review.

H appy 2024. I always have high hopes for new years, though each of the past four, in its own special way, was a lulu of ignorance, rancor, delusion, and piffle. We understand the full range of our woes but lack the elasticity, much less the fortitude, to slay them. Will 2024 be the year of no más or siempre más, of doing what’s good and right or tossing one elephantine hairball after another, again?

Always an optimist but clearly a contrarian, I decided to start the art year in Boston. Boston? The city of puritan cant, left-wing pomp, and the meanest drivers in the world? Next to Harvard, now in a lampoonable mess over race, hate, hubris, and mediocrity? Lampoonable if it weren’t so revolting. The Hamas-infused bacchanal there after October 7 was the newest of new lows.

Yes, to Boston, and why? For Sargent. That’s John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) and Fashioned by Sargent, the new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a splendid show, done with London’s Tate Britain gallery, that focuses on the clothes worn by Sargent’s sitters. Not any old clothes, and often not clothes his subjects wanted to wear. We see Sargent as painter but also as designer and choreographer. “I’m a painter and a dressmaker,” he said, knowing in his bones that clothes make the man, woman, and child.

I’ll write two stories on the exhibition, which is first-rate, looking first at Sargent’s women and what they wore and, on Saturday, Sargent’s men. I’ll toss his children into the mix. I have no interest in the doings of children, much less their looks, with the giant exception of their education as future citizens, productive workers, and taxpayers. Sargent, though, was a gifted portraitist of children.

Before visiting, I’d read the catalogue for Fashioned by Sargent, so I knew the big enchiladas would be there: Dr. Pozzi, Madame X, Lady Agnew, with the ultimate come-hither look, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, who reminds me of Hillary Clinton, and Wertheimers galore. I’ve seen the portraits of Graham Robertson, Mrs. Carl Meyer, Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, and Lord Ribblesdale so many times that I feel as though I know them, though I doubt imperious Ribblesdale would have condescended to know me.

I’ve written about Sargent whenever I can. His work is so arch and juicy. I knew the MFA would do him up big. Sargent, after all, is an MFA superstar. He’s American but only peripherally. Sargent is from no place in America. The son of expatriate parents, he was born in Florence, grew up all over Europe, became famous in Paris, settled in London, and traveled a lot, mostly to Spain and Venice. If he’s “of” anyplace, though, it’s Boston.

He first came to America when he was 21, and only because he would have lost his American citizenship if he hadn’t. He had lots of Boston Brahmin family connections, and from the early 1890s to well into the Teens, his biggest commission was the murals program at the Boston Public Library. Sargent was in Boston a lot for that mammoth job. It led to his last big commission, also in Boston and at the MFA. His murals for the museum’s rotunda and grand staircase are there, as well as The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, dozens of other Sargents, and his archives.

Yes, the MFA is the place for Sargent, and Sargent’s portraits — dazzling, sexy, sly, orchidaceous — are, together, the antidote to our vapid, dank era.

Fashioned by Sargent shows about 75 objects, most of them paintings from 1879 to 1923, but with a good selection of dresses worn by his sitters. Many of the paintings are from private collections. Lady Sassoon, from 1907, starts the festivities, and what a picture. She’s wearing a black taffeta cape in full swish as she seems to head to the opera. She leads a group of six portraits, all but one of women, and all variations in basic white and black.

She was, of course, posing in Sargent’s studio. He advised her on what to wear. An opera lover, she’s dressed in character. Taffeta is crisp and thin enough to rustle and crinkle as the wearer moves. Each crinkle in the black mass reflects light in its own way. Sargent was a master of black-on-black, passionate as he was about the art of Hals, Velázquez, and Van Dyke. Using varieties of black, sometimes mixing black and white to make shiny gray, Sargent makes subtle zigzags that look modern.

Her ladyship wasn’t prancing around the studio, though. Sargent pleated and pinned the cape’s material to get the look he wanted. He also pinned a line of black taffeta running from her head to her hand to show a sinuous streak of her cloak’s pink lining and a triangle and rectangle of pink here and there. She wears an ink-black feather hat that a family of birds could call home, as long as Sargent vetted their palette.

She cuts a dynamic figure. The House of Worth cloak she wore is next to the painting. It just stands still, since Sassoon and Sargent endowed it with magic. Sargent’s Portrait of Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, from around 1880, is early and not my favorite, but it shows Sargent, more than 25 years before, in Paris, choreographing every part of the image, rearranging the furniture, dictating the sitter’s dress, a riot of black and white, and concealing her bustle so that black and white passages seem to cascade. It’s too pretty and too posed, but it helps launch Sargent as portraitist to Paris’s newly rich.

Paris-based haute couture for women was new. The House of Worth and other bespoke makers provided rich women with what Edith Wharton called “social armor.” By the 1870s, these businesses had discerning clients in Paris and London. By the 1880s, America’s Gilded Age doyennes were traveling to Paris and spending big bucks for unusual fabrics, expert sewing, and a look made for them. Sargent, looking at a client, usually developed a composition and palette driven by her dress as well as her coloring. Fashion houses exhibited at World’s Fairs. The term “conspicuous consumption,” coined in 1899, and “au courant” since then, embraced $5 cigars, baronial houses, diamond tiaras, and dresses.

By the 1900, Sargent, a portraitist of international stature, wanted £1,000 for a full-length portrait, or about £160,000 ($204,000) today. That’s a lot of moolah. By that time, he’d been in London for 15 years. He’d had some lean years during Britain’s great agricultural depression of the early 1890s, which made many aristocrats tight with their guineas. They were selling art, not buying it. He’d found a rich and insistent clientele in America, painting 40 portraits in one 1890 trip.

American fashion was, of course, different, so Sargent needed to learn a new visual language for his new American patrons. Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis, from 1890, depicts the mother, who was very rich, in practical day-in, day-out clothes and her son in a sailor suit. What a difference between 1880 and 1890. By the ’90s, American women weren’t hothouse flowers anymore. The Gibson Girl visualized what was called the New Woman — outdoorsy, independent, and problem-solving. And the portrait doesn’t have a whiff of dynasty. That’s American.

Mrs. Davis, matter of fact, is one version of the New Woman, while Mrs. Charles Thursby, painted by Sargent around 1897, is another. She’s not a birdbrain. She’s political. She juts into our space and wears green, white, and violet, standing for Give Votes to Women.

Eleanora Iselin, wife of a New York financier, brought a selection of her latest Paris dresses to her first sitting. No, Sargent said, he wanted to paint her in the black day dress she was already wearing, couture but no obvious fireworks. He loved the sheen of its silk satin and the jet-black trimmings. Flicks of white made the dress’s black beads seem to shimmer. At that point, Mrs. Iselin was in her late 60s. Sargent wanted her dressed to suit her age and, of course, her personality. As they chatted in her Manhattan drawing room, Sargent noticed what he called “that dominating little finger” gesturing from her right hand as she balanced herself on her Louis XVI table.

I loved seeing a critical mass of Sargent’s portraits of members of the Wertheimer family, headed by Asher Wertheimer, a successful London art dealer. Between 1898 and 1908, Sargent painted eleven portraits of Asher and his wife and their daughters and sons. Three are on view, all of Wertheimer’s daughters. Individually and as a group, they’re smashing. Vibrant, even boisterous, the women are dressed to the nines but move freely, too freely for critics in Sargent’s day, who saw them as pushy and “too Jewish.”

In Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie, Italian for “in full sail,” from 1904, the subject laughs as she dresses as a cavalier, her weapon a broomstick. Few people smile, much less laugh, in portraits, but she’s having a fine old time. In Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer, from 1908, another daughter dresses as a Turk. Jews, Sargent knew, weren’t free from all the conventions of bourgeois self-display, but they were freer, and Almina was happy to go along for the ride.

Madame X is in the exhibition. It’s owned by the Met, so lots of people have seen it. It’s in a section called “Fashioning Power,” and that’s fine but squishy, since most of Sargent’s portraits are about power, whether it’s the power of money, poise, personality, or sex. Sargent’s Wertheimer women have a certain power. As Jews, they were free from at least some social conventions, which is a kind of power, as well as rich, a power as old as time.

So much ink has been spilled over Madame X, starting with its premiere in front of an audience of aghast critics and viewers in Paris in 1884 and then every time it’s been displayed since then. The catalogue dedicates a chapter to the portrait, and the exhibition label says it was scandalous, in part because of Sargent’s original version in which one of her dress straps falls off her shoulder.

The painting deserves a more expansive interpretation for viewers. It’s not my favorite thing. I agree with the critics in 1884 who wrote that his subject, Amélie Gautreau, the daughter of a Confederate general whose mother moved her family to Paris, looks like a machine, not a woman. That said, most visitors see it as the star of the show. A deeper dive is needed. Enquiring minds want to know more.

I learned from the book, for example, that her strapless moment caused a stir, but so did the two fabric panels covering her bosom. They had no visible means of unyielding support, proposing that a man could sneak a feel. Women visitors to the Salon showing gathered to look at what painter and sitter had wrought, and the picture was a conspiracy between them, and men in turn gathered to ogle the women.

One of the best features of the catalogue is its use of critic quotes contemporaneous with a portrait’s premiere at art shows in Paris or London. As a critic myself, I like to be quoted and don’t begrudge critics of yore, though dead, a moment in the sun. Critics, alas, weren’t always kind to Sargent’s portraits of women.

George Moore, a lovely art writer, said Sargent painted Mrs. Hugh Hammersley in 1892 as if he were transcribing a color photograph of her dress rather than a woman with a personality. D. H. Lawrence called Sargent’s portraits “nothing but yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops, with a pretty head pipped on top.” These and other critical comments don’t make it into the show’s interpretation. That’s too bad.

I think the Hammersley portrait is sublime, but viewers need to know that contemporary takes were mixed. Lawrence is Lawrence and not temperamentally drawn to Sargent’s style, but Moore’s quip is a stiletto slipped between the ribs. Sargent’s excessive attention to dresses reduces his painting to another costume drama with Sarah Bernhardt. “Another season, another play,” Moore said. Sargent diminishes his sitter’s individuality.

Another critic called Sargent’s portrait of Mrs. Hammersley “decadent and violent,” which are fightin’ words. Her red gown is too red, so much so that it had to be produced using a synthetic dye rather than a natural one. That’s fierce and unfair, especially since Sargent’s Portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, also from 1892, was much loved for its soft lavender sash and white silk dress.

I adore both portraits but, to me, Lady Agnew is the one charged with sex. Mrs. Hammersley is, synthetic dye or no, matronly. The sitter in Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon, from 1904, on loan from the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, is both sexy and cunning, another kind of power. She reminds me of Regina Giddens as portrayed by Bette Davis in The Little Foxes. Yes, she’s beautiful but she’s diabolical, too, and her dress is cut as low as the time would allow. Sargent painted Lady Vincent in Venice, and it seems, according to the label, that her dress was imagined by Sargent. She wore a white dress for her sittings.

Diabolical Lady Vincent wasn’t. She was one of the great beauties of her time and a renowned hostess who served as a nurse anesthetist during the First World War. Sargent, putting Bette Davis aside, invented her look, except her beauty, which was compelling indeed.

On Saturday I’ll further plumb Fashioned by Sargent, since it’s a beautiful exhibition, and, as 2024 begins, we need as much succor as we can find. The arrangement is up to the MFA’s high standards. An introductory wall panel is draped by black fabric — not satin or silk but impressive and evocative. Some of the galleries’ walls are too light in color, but other galleries, painted in hunter green, serve Sargent’s reds well. The exhibition also uses sections of William Morris wallpaper for the display of art.