There is no greater work of art than a great portrait,’ declared Henry James, concluding: ‘If you are to be so represented… it is nothing that you be great or good – it is everything that you be dressed.’
That sentiment underpins the sumptuous show Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain this month. The exhibition is a collaboration between Tate and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, both institutions that recognised and supported John Singer Sargent during his lifetime; and the only surprise is that it has taken almost 100 years since his death to view his paintings through the prism of his sitters’ dress.
Who would not choose to have their portrait painted by Sargent? As Andy Warhol observed, he ‘made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner.’ No wonder he is recognised as the Grand Manner portraitist of the Belle Époque and his sitters are more consistently taken as fashion icons than those of any other artist.
In 2016, American label Marchesa based its New York Fashion Week collection on ‘the ultra-feminine strength’ of Sargent’s portraits: ‘Each girl is going to feel like her own portrait… but they are all glamorous, ethereal,’ said designer Georgina Chapman. And when Gilded Glamour was chosen as the 2022 theme for the world’s most prestigious fashion event – the Met Gala – Gucci, Tory Burch and Burberry all took portraits by Sargent as their inspiration to dress Billie Eilish, Adwoa Aboah and Bella Hadid.
The idea for pairing portraits with fashion originated with Erica E Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts. Hirshler was fascinated by dress in the Gilded Age, when women spent much time changing clothes, wearing different dresses for morning and afternoon, and elegant gowns for the evening. In Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in 1870s New York, Newland Archer reflects on his wife’s need to have the right dress for the right occasion: ‘It’s their armour [sic], their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.’
As a Sargent scholar, researching for a lecture on his male portraits in 2016, Hirshler was struck by the role the artist played in determining the dress of his sitters. Together with James Finch, assistant curator of 19th-century British art at Tate Britain, they examined the way Sargent used fashion in his paintings. Writing to JP Morgan Jr in 1906 before undertaking his wife’s portrait, Sargent said: ‘The question to be settled is the one of the dress – and that can best be determined by the light of the studio.’ He advises his sitter ‘to bring a box with different dresses and actually put one or two on’.
Sometimes, to the annoyance of his sitters, Sargent was dissatisfied even with a choice of dresses. Eleanora O’Donnell Iselin reportedly had several expensive outfits expressly made, only to be told by Sargent that he would rather paint her as she was, in a somewhat severe black day dress suitable for receiving visitors in her New York townhouse. Studying her portrait in this exhibition, alongside a matching dress from the same date, one can see how Sargent’s desire to create different tones of black, just like Frans Hals, an artist who he greatly admired, allowing his brush to capture the folds and textures of the fabric, would override his sitter’s desire to present herself in her finest gown.
Hirshler takes the theme further, likening Sargent’s portraits to performances and the painter as theatre director ‘selecting, posing, pinning, and draping’. His characters wear the costumes selected for them because he is held in such high esteem. ‘They are willing to let Sargent take liberties with them because it is like being punched in the ribs by a king.’
Sargent himself remains an enigmatic figure, who never married and whose personal life is shrouded in mystery. The child of an itinerant American family, he was born in Florence in 1856. His father was an eye surgeon, with a skill in medical illustration, and his mother was an amateur artist, who believed travelling around Europe absorbing its art and architecture was the best education. In 1874, with the encouragement of his parents, the 18-year-old John moved to Paris to study under the society portraitist known as Carolus-Duran. His approach to the art of portraiture was radical, advocating painting directly onto canvas without preparatory sketches or underdrawings, a freedom which suited the young painter’s quick method of working.
Paris in the mid-19th century was fast becoming an international epicentre of style. The establishment of the Second Empire in 1852, with Napoleon III as the new emperor, had made Paris an imperial capital once again. Couture houses emerged to satisfy the new appetite for glamour, none more successful than the House of Worth, founded by the Englishman Charles Worth.
Maison Worth became a favourite among American women, for whom an annual trip to Paris would generally result in the acquisition of dresses. Three magnificent gowns from the House of Worth, belonging to Sargent’s good friend the Boston philanthropist and collector Sarah Choate Sears, are displayed alongside the portraits, the earliest a deep sapphire blue walking dress, probably bought on her wedding trip in 1877. In the same year, Sargent made a triumphant debut at the Paris Salon with a striking portrait of his childhood friend Fanny Watts.
Parisians flocked to sit for him. Amalia Subercaseaux, wife of the Chilean consul in Paris, remembers how Sargent came to their Bois de Boulogne apartment to choose an outfit. The composition shows her at the piano, which she played while he painted, the train of her afternoon dress creating a waterfall of black and white silk and lace. Exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1881, the portrait was awarded a medal, earning him the right to exhibit at future Salons without the need to submit to the jury.
By 1882, Sargent’s reputation was such that he was able to choose his own subjects. His eye was drawn to the captivating young American wife of a French banker, Virginie Gautreau, widely admired for her choice of fashion and cosmetics, painting her skin white and – more bizarrely – applying rouge to her ears. Sargent persuaded her to sit for him and produced an audacious portrait, accentuating her bold profile and selecting a black dress with plunging décolletage to highlight the lavender-white tones of her skin. The original version of the painting, called Madame X, showed one of the silver chain straps falling off the shoulder. She was delighted, writing to a friend that ‘Mr Sargent made a masterpiece of the portrait’, but public opinion when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1884 was not so kind. Both artist and sitter were condemned as vulgar and attention-seeking. Virginie’s mother arrived at Sargent’s studio in tears, begging him to withdraw it from the exhibition, but he would only agree to repaint the fallen strap.
The fallout was such that Sargent moved to London in 1886, believing ‘there is perhaps more chance for me there’. Still, Sargent kept Madame X in his studio until his death in 1915, when he sold it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York saying: ‘I think it might be the best thing I have ever done.’
His move to London was judicious and his international pedigree played to his advantage. Over the two decades that followed, he moved between London and Boston, producing some 500 portraits of British and American sitters. The British embraced him as the contemporary proponent of the Grand Manner tradition, initiated by Sir Anthony Van Dyck in the 17th century, and passed through Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence. For the Americans, meanwhile, Sargent was linked to the Boston portraitist John Singleton Copley, revered as the country’s first Old Master. Many of his Boston sitters were descendants of Copley’s sitters, as was Sargent himself.
Sargent’s portrait of the 9th Duke of Marlborough’s family was commissioned to hang opposite a Reynolds portrait of an earlier generation of the family at Blenheim Palace, and both are indebted in composition and style to the Van Dyck Pembroke family portrait at Wilton House. Sargent’s portrait of the Duchess of Portland likewise places his subject by an Ionic column at Welbeck Abbey, the Portland family seat since the 17th century, in a pose and costume that both recall Van Dyck and Gainsborough. In the flick of a brush, Sargent had paid homage not only to the current holder of the title but to 300 years of the Portland lineage.
One of the most intimate portraits in the exhibition is of Sargent’s close friend Sybil Sassoon, whom he painted when she was 19 and married to the Earl of Rocksavage. By contrast, another more formal portrait nine years later, with the same soulful eyes, shows her full-length, wearing a Renaissance-inspired black silk gown with magenta satin collar, on show in the exhibition and commissioned by Sargent for the occasion from the House of Worth, at a cost to himself of £200.
In 1907, aged 51, Sargent closed his studio, concluding: ‘Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.’ He turned his hand instead to mural commissions in Boston. But Sargent will always be remembered for his portraits.
The intriguing change of titles between venues for this exhibition – ‘Fashioned by Sargent’ in Boston, ‘Sargent and Fashion’ in London – suggests that the curators have found much to explore: both the importance of fashion to Sargent and his sitters and Sargent’s masterful fashioning of his own compositions.
This article was first published in the March issue of Tatler, on sale now. Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain from 22 February to 7 July. John Singer Sargent: Fashion & Swagger is in cinemas across the UK from Tuesday 16 April
