The Musée d'Orsay in Paris is currently hosting a major exhibition dedicated to John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the American artist who became the premier portraitist of Belle Époque high society. While Sargent's art may appear highly academic at first glance, closer examination reveals its singularity and underlying strangeness. The exhibition, titled "Sargent: Dazzling Paris," focuses specifically on the pivotal decade the artist spent in the French capital from 1874 to 1884.
Sargent was passionate about Spanish and Dutch painting and was a great admirer of Édouard Manet. Beyond his renowned society portraits, he also experimented with genre scenes, painting Breton fishermen and Gypsy dances in Andalusia, as well as landscapes in a naturalistic style that flirted timidly with Impressionism. "He is a painter of light, who flirts slightly with Impressionism," notes the exhibition's co-curator Paul Perrin, who organized the show alongside Caroline Corbeau-Parsons.
The exhibition brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and watercolors from major American museums in Philadelphia, Williamstown, Boston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Until now, opportunities to see Sargent's works in France have been rare, with the exception of a 2007 confrontation titled "Painters of Light: Sargent-Sorolla" at the Petit Palais in Paris. "He is part of those foreign artists that the Musée d'Orsay is committed to making known. Apart from monographic exhibitions dedicated to Thomas Eakins and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, there have been quite few projects around American art," explains curator Paul Perrin.
Born in Italy to American parents, Sargent grew up in a well-to-do family and began his training at the Florence Academy. When he arrived in Paris at age 18, he spoke five languages, including French. Admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, he chose to study under the portraitist Carolus-Duran, who would become one of his supporters. The portrait he painted of his teacher in 1879, capturing him in an elegant yet casual posture, would be his first success at the Salon.
During his early years in Paris, Sargent spent most of his time with English or American expatriates. Among the French, he befriended Paul Helleu. While he probably did not see the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874, he visited the second one with Helleu in 1876, where he met Claude Monet. The two artists would maintain a friendly relationship, exchanging letters and meeting at Giverny from 1882 onward, and later in London in the early 1900s. It was also with Monet that Sargent launched a subscription to bring Manet's "Olympia" into the Luxembourg Museum in 1890.
Sargent encountered Edgar Degas and Auguste Rodin, befriended Albert de Belleroche, and exhibited alongside Ernest Ange Duez, Albert Besnard, and Henri Jourdain. He quickly established himself in fashionable circles, responding to commissions but more often approaching models himself who could enhance his reputation. One of his most successful portraits from this early period was that of Dr. Pozzi in 1881. Close to Marcel Proust and Edmond de Polignac, this renowned surgeon allowed the painter access to the very select circle of the Union Artistique. Dressed in a cardinal red dressing gown, the man dazzles with his presence. Impressive in its format (more than two meters), this full-length portrait against a neutral background is a true manifesto of Sargent's style.
"I do not dig beneath the surface for things that do not appear before my eyes," Sargent once said. As a painter of social appearances, he did not internalize or seek to translate the psychology of his models. While his technical mastery aligned him with academicism, the naturalness of poses and the truthfulness of gazes placed him in the lineage of realism. Sargent integrated the tradition of portraitists like Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals, whom he discovered during a trip to Spain in 1879. "His works are those of a colorist. He is far from David and Ingres. He highlights the virtuosity of the brush. He adapts his science of painting to the expression of an era. He knows how to capture the spirit of the times," emphasizes Paul Perrin.
To his portraits of men—whose beauty and seduction have fueled hypotheses about the artist's homosexuality—Sargent added a vast corpus of works devoted to women. Supported by numerous women including art critics Judith Gautier and Emma Allouard-Jouan, he painted Madame Paul Escudier in 1882 in elegant chiaroscuro, then Mrs. Henry White the following year. This portrait was among the paintings he sent to the Royal Academy in London. Their good reception made Sargent known in England, where he would receive important commissions upon his arrival in 1884.
He also immortalized Mrs. Harry Vane Milbank (1883-1884), shown three-quarters view, in a mixture of distance and sensuality that gives her mysterious beauty. Sargent also produced portraits with multiple figures, including "The Pailleron Children" (circa 1880) and "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (1882), an exceptional loan from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This is undoubtedly one of Sargent's most innovative paintings in terms of construction and framing. In the eyes of writer Henry James, the artist "offers the strangely disturbing spectacle of a talent that at the threshold of its career has already nothing left to learn."
The Musée d'Orsay reveals two previously unseen works: the "Portrait of Winnaretta Singer Scey-Montbéliard," held in private hands and not presented since 1889, and that of "Madame O'Connor (Marguerite de Ganay)," a painting that anticipates "Madame X" and had never been seen, not even at the Metropolitan where the exhibition was presented last spring.
Sargent dusted off academicism without completely breaking free from it. During his Parisian years, when he painted hundreds of canvases, he multiplied his travels, and the works he created in Tangier or Venice were freer in their touch. He was a painter of light who excelled in landscape art ("Atlantic Sunset," 1876-1878). At the end of the 1870s, some critics associated him with Impressionism. However, Sargent would never exhibit with Monet, Renoir, or Morisot, and the rare works that could be related to their style—"Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (1885-1886) with its little girls lighting Japanese lanterns in an English garden—were created after his departure from Paris.
Sargent had been considering leaving the capital for England as early as 1882. The scandal caused by the portrait of "Madame X" in 1884 would be the trigger. The model was Virginie Gautreau, a banker's wife. He depicted her in profile, wearing a long black dress. The first version sent to the Salon unleashed criticism. The face was too made-up, the skin too white, the neckline too deep. One of the straps of her dress had slipped, exposing her shoulder. The painter corrected course and retouched his painting. A masterpiece of the Met's 19th-century collections, this portrait was its author's favorite. His reputation was tarnished. In Paris, Sargent was no longer the young rising star who amazed everyone. But London awaited him.
When he arrived in London, Sargent was an accomplished painter. He continued the portrait activity that made his living and also exhibited in the United States, but did not forget Paris, where he returned regularly and continued sending paintings to the Salon until 1905. In England, he painted great masterpieces including "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" and "La Carmencita," which would be the first painting by the artist to enter a French institution. Acquired by the State for the Luxembourg Museum in 1892, the portrait of the Spanish dancer, now in the Orsay collections, was a revenge for Sargent after the setbacks of "Madame X." From 1907, he tired of oil portraits, created them in charcoal, and multiplied watercolor landscapes. He would also create a decoration for the Boston Public Library, completed in 1919.
The exhibition runs at the Musée d'Orsay from September 23 to January 11. Sargent is part of those artists from the late 19th century who, after their death, were consigned to oblivion and then remained in the shadow of the Impressionists. In recent years, the Musée d'Orsay has been committed to bringing back to light interesting painters like Jean-Léon Gérôme and James Tissot who, without revolutionizing painting, mattered in their time. However, as a portraitist, Sargent produced very large formats that were at the time rather reserved for historical or mythological subjects. Works like "Madame X" or "Dr. Pozzi at Home" need to be seen from a distance to be appreciated, which proves challenging in the cramped spaces reserved for temporary exhibitions at the Musée d'Orsay.
