 |
| John Singer Sargent self portrait |
Factoids to impress your friends from the new portrait exhibition at the Met
by
It’s easy to peg John Singer Sargent—whose best-known portraits are of stiff-backed children and elaborately dressed socialites drowning in tulle—as a fluffy society painter of the rigid late-Victorian era. To wit, the biggest scandal of his career involved a portrait of “Madame X,” aka socialite Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautrea, with a lasciviously draped dress strap falling onto her shoulder. (Gasp!)
But Sargent (1856–1925) was infinitely more freewheeling than his better-known works would imply. In the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, which opens on June 30 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a different kind of painter emerges.
“The show demonstrates that he moved very easily through these circles of progressive society,” says Stephanie Herdrich, who co-curated the show. “Many gay men, flamboyant performers, intellectuals, he was very comfortable with all of them.”
There are 91 portraits of just these characters in the show (along with another 21 drawings from the Met’s collection), which range from the famous—Claude Monet, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.B. Yeats, and Henry James—to random characters whom Sargent encountered as he bounced around Europe and North America. We’ve chosen a few of the most notable examples, the radical feminists and captains of industry and flamenco dancers, who present a neat alternative to Sargent’s reputation as a fussy painter of the upper crust.
There are 91 portraits of just these characters in the show (along with another 21 drawings from the Met’s collection), which range from the famous—Claude Monet, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.B. Yeats, and Henry James—to random characters whom Sargent encountered as he bounced around Europe and North America. We’ve chosen a few of the most notable examples, the radical feminists and captains of industry and flamenco dancers, who present a neat alternative to Sargent’s reputation as a fussy painter of the upper crust.
 |
| Dr Pozzi at Home, 1881 - John Singer Sargent |
The Parisian Samuel-Jean Pozzi palled around with royalty and wrote one of the first major textbooks on gynecological surgery. He was an early patron of Sargent, and, among other things, collected antiquities, sculpture, and tapestries. Viewers of the portrait, where the doctor lounges in a crimson bathrobe while fingering his lapel, will probably not be surprised to learn that he was also considered “a sensualist and an aesthete,” according to the catalog.
 |
| John Singer Sargent, Léon Delafosse, c. 1895-8 |
Léon Delafosse, whose patron was Comte Robert de Montesquiou, was a celebrated pianist and composer and friend of the Parisian beau monde, including Proust. “Sargent was so intimately a part of these circles,” Herdrich says. “We think of him quickly dashing off society portraits, but he was deliberately seeking out these intellectuals.” Still, there was a question of accessories. As Sargent wrote to a friend: “Of course Delafosse is a decadent especially in the matter of neck-ties—but he is a very intelligent little Frenchman.”
 |
| John Singer Sargent, Man Wearing Laurels, 1874-80 |
 |
| Lord Dalhousie (1900). John Singer Sargent. Oil on canvas. 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Private collection |
 |
| John Singer Sargent |
No comments:
Post a Comment