John Singer Sargent’s scintillating technique made him the most celebrated portraitist of the late Victorian age, and he had an equally good eye for choosing what his sitters wore, says
Rebecca Wallersteiner
‘Think of a cherry-coloured velvet filling half the picture – the pale cherry-pink known as cerise – with mauve lights, and behind it pale yellowish draperies and an Aubusson carpet under the lady’s feet.’ This was how the critic George Moore advised his readers to visualise John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Mrs Hugh Hammersley.
Sargent (1856-1925) was the greatest portrait painter of his age. His pictures defined an era and caused a sensation, although not always in the way his clients expected. Now a sumptuous show at Tate Britain, staged in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, traces his career as an artist, stylist and manipulator of fashion. It features 60 of his paintings, some of which are paired with the original gowns and accessories worn by his sitters.
‘Several of these garments have been reunited for the first time with Sargent’s portraits of their wearers,’ says James Finch, the curator of Sargent and Fashion. ‘They offer a fresh perspective on the most celebrated portraitist of his generation and the fashionable society in which he worked.’
Rather than just holding up a mirror to the haute couture of the day, Sargent made fashion part of his artistic repertoire. ‘He would have had an opinion on what his sitters wore, and often pinned or draped their garments, acting rather like an art director at a fashion shoot today,’ says Finch. ‘He was on a tightrope: he had to manage his sitters’ expectations, making them look fashionable enough to get favourable notice at public exhibitions, yet not become subservient or stifle his creative freedom.’
Born in Florence in 1856, the only son of wealthy American parents, Sargent had an international upbringing and career and spent his childhood touring Europe, mainly Italy, France and Germany. He trained in Paris under the portraitist Carolus-Duran and travelled to Spain and Haarlem, where he copied works by Velazquez and Frans Hals.
In Paris, in the 1880s, he cultivated the expatriate American community as patrons, alongside a circle of artists and writers, including Henry James.
One of the most stunning portraits on display in the Tate exhibition is Sargent’s po
