Off-Center Views: Fashioned by Sargent is Visually Stunning

12/8/23

Fashioned by Sargent is Visually Stunning

Fashioned by Sargent

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Through January 16, 2024

Many New Englanders think of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) as one of their own, but that’s wishful thinking. His father was from Gloucester, but John was born in Florence, Italy and was an expatriate for most of his life. He did spend time in Boston, where he painted society figures, but is best known here for his mural work, including the MFA dome ceiling. Mostly he studied, lived, and worked in London, Paris, and Venice. He had a complicated relationship with opulence and his bachelor life is up for dispute. He had brief affairs with women, but he was probably either gay or bisexual.

What is not up for dispute is that Sargent is among the greatest portrait painters in the history of Western art. Perhaps only Franz Hals painted white on white or black on black as well as he.

The MFA’s Fashioned by Sargent (in conjunction with Tate Britain) shows people in haute couture and also displays some of the clothing we see on the walls. It’s a large show marred only by harsh lighting that does not show Sargent’s oils in their best light. You will see how the light reflects off the canvases, which is why I shot some from the side to reduce the “bounce.” (Don’t even ask how long they took to edit!)

Suffice it say that those of means in the Gilded Age and Edwardian era wore their wealth. We see this in one of the show’s first portraits, “Madame Ramon Subercaseaux.” (Please note that it was the custom of the day to identify women by their marital status, a rule Sargent sometimes broke.) What do you see first, the gown or her face? Notice how the blacks bleed seamlessly into one another.

Madame Ramon Subercaseaux

The goal of Fashioned by Sargent is to show how carefully Sargent dressed and rendered his models. It was often not the subject who chose what to wear. He often kept clothing in his ateliers and insisted that sitters don them. When Mrs. Fiske Warren and her daughter Rachel came to his studio, Rachel wanted to wear green velvet; Sargent insisted she don the pink gown we see below. Note the dry brush work in the detail.


Mrs. Fiske Warren

Detail

He did the same with young W. Graham Robertson and told him he “must” wear the long coat Sargent handed him. He likely did the same in his famed portrait “Dr. Pozzi at Home.” Samuel John Pozzi (1846-1918) was a French gynecologist and apparently a bit of a rake, but it’s unlikely he wore such a red robe around his parlor.

Dr Pozzi at Home

And then there’s the matter of “Madame X,” Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau, perhaps Sargent’s most famous portrait because it scandalized viewers and critics. He painted two versions in 1883-84, the first one deemed obscene because her decolletage was even deeper and one strap suggestively fell from her shoulder. To top it off, she was the wife of a friend but rumors swirled she had a fling with the artist!

Madame X

One of the favorite paintings at MFA is Sargent’s portrait of the daughters of Mrs. Edward Darling Boit. We get a portrait of her in the show wearing a flamboyant hat made of bird of paradise feathers. We also see the hat, which is even more imposing than it appears on canvas. It is indirectly linked to the 1895 founding of the Audubon Society, in part an attempt to save the fowl from an estimated 100,000 wearers of its plumage.

Mrs. Edward Darling Boit

Bird of Paradise hat

Sargent also broke a few conventions. He dressed Ena Wertheimer (1904) in theatrical male garb in “A Vele Gonfire” (“In Full Sail”) and championed the New Woman ready for sporting action in “Mrs. Charles Thursby.” Her maiden name was Alice Brisbane, a socialist and Free Thinker. There are several portraits of his niece, Rose-Marie Ormond: “The Black Brook” (1908) and “Repose” (1911). As curatorial commentary notes, in each case “cloth” was the real main subject. There’s certainly a lot of it in the latter.

Ena Wertheimer

Mrs. Charles Thursby

Repose

If I had to pick my favorite images, two, spring to mind, the first of which was of actress Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth. Her costume is spectacular, the iridescent green coming from sewing beetle wings into her pseudo-Celtic gown. The entire was draped with a scarlet velvet cape.

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

Beetle Wing Dress

Cloak Detail

Another favorite–and an unusually “modern-looking” one despite its Tudor background paneling–is of Elsie Palmer (1890) that’s sometimes called “Lady in White,” though there’s a subtle lavender scarf on her lap. Like the previous one, it evokes the Pre-Raphaelites.