John Singer Sargent, the Ultimate American in Paris

Sargent and Paris at the Met delivers a cultural polyglot with a French soul.

I’ m relieved to confess something I’ve believed from my earliest days as an art historian. John Singer Sargent is a great artist. Great not only as in eye-catching, dazzling, eminent, and profound, but also great as in worthy of a spot on art’s Olympus. Yes, he’s famous for portraits, many of British aristocrats, and we all know the saying about the unspeakable pursuing the inedible, coined by Sargent’s friend, Oscar Wilde. Portraits are about style and sparkle, so no portraitist could be a great artist, or so was the assumption during my days as a student. I knew then that this was wrong. Nearly all of Velázquez’s, van Dyck’s, and Hals’s paintings are portraits, as are most of Goya’s, Whistler’s, and Rembrandt’s. And Sargent (1856–1925) did much else besides portraits. His scenes of everyday life — in oil and watercolor — are radiant and seriously modern.

The Met’s new exhibition, Sargent and Paris, convinced me to unbosom myself. At my age, why keep secrets? It’s a splendid exhibition. It’s about Sargent’s savvy and genius as a painter in Paris from the late 1870s, when he was barely out of school, to 1884, when the portrait later called Madame X shocked Paris. It’s also about the lifelong centrality of French culture to Sargent. Though he considered himself an American, Paris was his heart and soul. Sargent died — in London — a hundred years ago last month so, loosely, Sargent and Paris is an anniversary show, though one defining him as the ultimate American in Paris.

I’ve seen almost all of the 99 works of art in Sargent and Paris before, some in the shows Fashioned by Sargent and Sargent and Spain. Still, Sargent always seems fresh, exotic, and canny. Sargent’s father was an affluent medical doctor whose book on treating battlefield wounds was a field-hospital standard. His mother was from a family with a tannery fortune. Both were Philadelphians. In 1854, they traveled to Europe, thinking they’d stay for a while, but, once there, his mother insisted she’d developed an allergy to steam, as in steam from a steamship. “A while” became forever. Both of his parents died in Europe.

Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. He first visited America in 1876, obliged to come before his 21st birthday in order to retain his American citizenship. As a child and teen, Sargent was part of a family of nomads. The Sargents moved a lot, often to the calendar of Europe’s high social seasons. They were affluent but not rich and would descend on, say, Nice just after the peak of the season, when prices were dropping. John grew to be fluent in French, German, and Italian and adept if not fluent in Spanish. His English was unaccented, though all his life colloquialisms were a weakness. He’d often reach for the French version first.

He wanted to be an artist. His parents were no obstacle, looked for schools for him, and decided on Paris and, as a teacher, Carolus-Duran, a mid-career portraitist with his own teaching studio and a style that Papa Sargent called “very broad, powerful, and realistic.” John agreed and by 1874 was in school in Paris.

“Look at Velázquez, look at Hals, but always go back to Velázquez,” Carolus-Duran drilled his students — Hals for the look of free, breezy brushwork, Velázquez for color and compositional poise. There’s a Sargent copy of a Hals figure in the Met’s show and his copy of Velázquez’s Las Meninas. But, judging from pictures such as Man Wearing Laurels, Atlantic Storm, and In the Luxembourg Gardens, all from his student days, Sargent was a polished proposition by the time he was in his early 20s.

Looking at these three in Sargent and Paris, we know we’re dealing with a phenomenon. Man Wearing Laurels, from 1874–1880, is the earliest of Sargent’s countless male pinups. It belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a bequest in 1940 from an old lady who displayed it in her bedroom and likely cherished it as much as Sargent cherished the subject. He painted Atlantic Storm in 1876 on the boat carrying him to America and to the extended Philadelphia family he’d never met. It’s dynamic and stirring, and it tells us how good Sargent is when it comes to art that’s not portraiture. Sargent almost never depicted the sights of Paris, and his Luxembourg Gardens scene is only on one level a cityscape. The gardens had just been refurbished after the disruptions of the German occupation of Paris in 1870 and the Commune, so they were an emblem of the new, modern Paris.

Sargent’s not in the picture, but he’s the invisible subject — Sargent the flaneur, the observant, astute man about town catching the small beauties of everyday life. Early-evening light caresses the dapper young couple. Splashes of red put spark in an otherwise cool palette. Sargent’s a master of accents like the red dot at the end of the man’s cigarette and the flash of red on the woman’s fan. Her abstract silk scarf is three or four strokes of thin paint. He’s taking “look at Hals” to heart.

Sargent inherited what the exhibition calls “nomadism” from his parents and, like them, was usually on the move — to Venice, Paris, Spain, Boston, the Alps, a spa town here, a beach resort there — and never stayed one place for long. He’s so famous as a portraitist, though, that it must surprise visitors to Sargent and Paris to see that his earliest Salon submissions were scenes of everyday life from his travels. In Paris, the annual Salon show, partly juried, was the art establishment’s pick of the litter. Managed by the École des Beaux-Arts and, by extension, the government, it was the place where officially approved styles got their marquee moment. Pictures, often well over a thousand, were stacked floor to ceiling, alphabetically by artist’s name, and ogled by hundreds of thousands.

El Jaleo, from 1882, isn’t in the Met show — it’s never lent — but I saw it a few weeks ago at its home in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. An Andalusian dance picture, it was the smash hit that year at the Salon, which had nearly 700,000 visitors and, among Paris art lovers, made Sargent a household name. It’s electric, a hot and sweaty scene of Romani performers stomping, strumming, and clapping. Sargent loved Spanish music, saw El Jaleo, or the Ruckus, performed in southern Spain, and painted the twelve-foot picture once he got back to Paris. He was 26.

Present among his first Salon pictures are Setting Out to Fish (En route pour la pêche), from 1878, depicting Breton women oysterers, or oysterettes; Among the Olive Trees, Capri (Dans les oliviers à Capri), a peasant scene, also from 1878; and Smoke of Ambergris (Fumée d’ambre gris), from 1880, a Moroccan fantasy. Each had a star turn.

The curators’ wall panels in Sargent and Paris suggest that Sargent was after anthropological types, inspired by colonial imperialism, yadda, yadda, yadda, but clearly the curators’ hearts aren’t in it.

They’re making the requisite gestures. Setting Out to Fish is about a sparkling sky, shadows, and light reflecting from puddles of water in the sand, skin, and ruffles. Reds, blues, and yellows shimmer. In the Capri picture, the model might be the quintessential flower of local peasantry, but she’s a prop. The picture’s about a vaporous, romantic ambiance.

Fumée d’ambre gris is a painting I know very well since it belongs to the Clark Art Institute, where I was a curator for years. Sargent and Paris gets it right. It’s an Orientalist scene descending from Delacroix and Gérôme. A woman who’s a cross between a sorceress and a sexpot breathes the smoke from ambergris, made from whale intestines. It smells sweet and musky with a touch of sea air and smooths rough edges. Or is she a kinky bride? Ambergris was thought by some to be an aphrodisiac. She’s too poised to be a virgin. Her attenuated fingers look too sure as they hold her veil, which could double as a tent if a bit of outdoor rutting’s desired.

No First Communion for her, in any event. Fumée is so “Other” that it’s been on the cover of some editions of Edward Said’s Orientalism.

More hypnotic, though, are Sargent’s layers of white. Much as Hals and van Dyck painted inky black on black on black, Sargent painted layers of silky, luminous white, subtly varied. The figure in Fumée is even set against white architecture. The painting’s also a gesture of adulation to Whistler’s women-in-white paintings. They helped make Whistler famous, so why not me?, he seems to think. And Sargent dressed the subject of Fumée as a composite. Her silver ornaments, dress, carpet, and brazier come from different parts of Morocco. I suppose she becomes a type, but that’s so far beyond the point. Everything about her makes for a total effect, and it’s not strictly decorative, or strictly art for art’s sake. As wrapped as she is, it’s a very sexy picture.

A single gallery in Sargent and Paris is well worth a trip to New York City. It’s a chapel-like space with three full-length portraits of the Pailleron family on the right wall, from 1879 and 1880; Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt), from 1882; a portrait of Madame Ramón Subercaseaux from 1880; and, as the altarpiece de la résistance, Dr. Pozzi at Home, from 1881.

The exhibition develops the theme of Sargent as a radical by looking at portraiture in the hierarchy of genres in Paris in the early 1880s. History and religious paintings topped the list. Portraiture dwelled near the bottom since its primary goal was thought to be to flatter and its compositional conventions — sitting or standing — were limited. Sargent, we learn, is part of a new wave in portraiture, pioneered in part by Manet but also by Impressionists such as Renoir and Degas to jettison generic background spaces and static poses in favor of modern environments, inside or outside, and an everyday look. The boundaries among portraiture, landscape, and genre painting — scenes of everyday life — blur.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the three Pailleron pictures together, so it gave me goose bumps. Papa and Mama Pailleron were friends of Sargent’s and, as his portraits go, early types. He was a famous playwright, about 20 years older than Sargent, whose haut-bourgeois comedy The World Where You’re Bored (Le Monde où l’on s’ennui) would soon have a thousand-performance run at the Comédie Française. His silk shirt’s rumpled and untucked, his jacket’s unfussed, his glance at us direct but cool and detached. One hand is on his hip, elbow nonchalantly in our space. The other holds a book. The background is fluffily domestic. He’s not posed for posterity and, unlike most portraits, he isn’t so serious that he looks embalmed. Mama is even more unorthodox. She wears a black evening gown and a red carnation corsage, both picked by Sargent. She stands in the family garden, hands crossed as she settles her dress from a gust of wind. Unlike, say, his Luxembourg Gardens scene, the setting isn’t formal. The lawn sweeps, but dead leaves and stray crocuses are unconventional touches. Mama’s red hair adds a bit of fire.

The portrait of the two Pailleron children belongs to the Des Moines Art Center and doesn’t travel much since it’s among the museum’s treasures. It’s a bizarre picture. The girl looks zonked but also like she’s auditioning for an Exorcist sequel, as does her brother, in black, with a creepy stare, big hands that look suitable for strangling someone, and that effete, evil pinkie. Sargent inflicted 83 sittings on the children, so it’s no wonder they look deranged.

Lady with the Rose is innocuous by comparison. It’s Sargent’s nod to Velázquez — not to his royal portraits but to his pictures of court jesters and their picturesque dress, arch looks, minimalist backgrounds, and informal gestures. The subject, Louise Burckhardt, was the daughter of a Swiss businessman and his American wife. She lived in Paris — typically international for Sargent — and she and Sargent might have been, briefly, a romantic item. Hence, she offers a white rose, but I think Sargent was more focused on deflowering Man Wearing Laurels. Madame Subercaseaux was the wife of a Chilean diplomat posted in Paris. She commissioned her portrait after seeing Fumée d’ambre gris at the Salon. Her husband later wrote that Sargent asked for Creole music by Louis Moreau Gottschalk to be played on the piano while he painted.

The picture is about the style of their home — elegant and comfortable — and Madame Subercaseaux’s easy look. Sargent dressed her to complement the piano — a black-and-white organza dress with accordion pleats. It’s lovely, and it won Sargent his first Salon prize, which meant that he didn’t have to go through the jury system for future submissions.

Thomas Gainsborough revered Joshua Reynolds but despised him as a competitor for what Gainsborough called “his damned variousness.” Variousness describes Sargent. Like Reynolds, Sargent has endless looks and poses in his quiver and picks the right one for each subject, which takes us to Dr. Pozzi. Pozzi was a celebrity gynecologist, famous on his own for his style and erudition but known to cater to women in Paris’s literary and art circles. His nickname was Dr. Love for his suavity and many affairs. He’s one of those men a glance at whom would make a woman pregnant.

I don’t think there are many examples of a high-society male portrait wearing a dressing gown, red, white, blue, or any other color, but there he is, looking like a lothario but also evoking Old Master pictures of Roman Catholic cardinals, except Pozzi isn’t fat, pasty, and geriatric. It’s a spectacle of a painting and a connivance between Pozzi and Sargent, though Sargent wouldn’t show it at the Salon. In 1881, he didn’t yet have the audacity. He showed it at an art show in Brussels in 1884, where one critic called all that red “gaudy, common, unbearable, unharmonious, and untonal . . . and the ultimate in decadent taste.” Another wrote that “it lacks substance, it aims to surprise, to astonish, it is theatrical, affected, in the end wearying, like a glass of Champagne filled too quickly.”

It still startles, though, and my story for Saturday will show that Sargent’s yen to shock has legs. Where’s Madame X, you ask? Hers is the strapless shoulder that launched Sargent’s career to London, new patrons, and new modes to make.