Lecture: John Singer Sargent's Parisian Portraits

thank you all so much I'm delighted to be here at the Art Institute it's a real pleasure for me to come to my second American Museum home if I can put it that way your collection is superb and it's been a great pleasure for me always to think about your beautiful pictures here is John Singer Sargent in Paris in the early 1880s and I want to set the stage for you a little bit in 1887 in an article about a young American painter who he felt quite sure would take America by storm John Singer Sargent Henry James wrote it sounds like a paradox but it is a very simple truth that when today we look for American art we find it mainly in Paris and when we find it out of Paris we find a great deal of Paris in it this is the moment when Paris is the capital of the Western art world it had taken over that position from Rome and thousands of artists from all countries flocked to the French capital to take advantage of the many opportunities that the city had to offer art schools exhibitions of work by both old masters and modern painters and original works of art from which to study Sargent who had been born in Florence to American expatriate parents showed precocious talent at a very young age and the family moved to Paris in 1874 when Sargent was just 18 years old so that he could study at those finest art schools he worked at the Ecole des Bazar one of the most rigorous training academies in Europe and he also began to study with the French artist Karel Durrell who immediately recognized that he had on his hands a star pupil the first painting that Sargeant decided to submit to the prestigious Salah exhibition in Paris was this one a likeness of his childhood friend Fanny Watts which he painted in 1877 and which today as of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Fanny was an American like Sargent her family had expatriated to Europe to economise that was something you could do in the 19th century doesn't seem possible today but after suffering financial losses in the United States the Watsons went to Europe where they could live much more comfortably and somewhere along the way they met the Sargent's in Italy or in southern France during the 1860s and Fanny and John Sargent remained lifelong friends sergeant's father described this painting as John's first serious work and it was accepted by the jury for display at the Paris salon in the spring of 1877 the salon was the way an artist built his or her reputation in both critical and public arenas and I'm showing you here a wonderful print by the French artist honoré daumier called the promenade of the influential critic from 1865 and you can see him strolling through the salaah exhibition while artists around him tipping their hat hoping hoping that he'll notice their work well the salon was a juried exhibition it was huge there were often thousands of paintings in the show it was one of the major artistic and social events of the season it was extensively reviewed and it didn't only count that you're painting why accepted by the jury for display at the salon it counted where it was displayed and to be hung on the line in other words at eye level instead of way up there or sky as they called it was extremely important because after all that promenade of the important critic he's probably only looking at things at his eye level and in 1877 sergeant sister Emily wrote that the Fanny wants portrait was and I quote accepted and very well hung at the salon well this kind of exhibition served to garner attention acclaim and the possibility of further Commission's or as sergeants father put it later in 1879 and I quote the proof of the pudding is in the eating so the best or one of the best evidence of a portrait success is the receiving by the artist of commissions to execute others well Fanny who you see here on the left again seems almost electrified sort of squirming in her chair her hands clenched on the arm rests of it she seems very much of the moment almost as if she's going to jump up and walk into our space and it's with works like this that sergeant began to announce his independence from his teacher careless during someone who was also highly admired for his lively portraits of fashionable women like the one you see on the right lady with a glove now at the Musee d'Orsay sergeants painting was noticed and discussed by the French critics one of whom called it and I quote a charming portrait of a young girl with a quality of light harmony one can only fault the tapered hands while another writer who admired the softness and gentle emotion quality of this likeness said that and that quote sergeant has done a better thing than the French do and I want you to keep that statement in mind because we'll be coming back to it sergeant's ambition was made all the more clear two years later in 1879 when he showed this portrait of his own teacher careless at the salon out carala Singh careless if you will something that was also noticed by the critics sergeant's painting which is now the Clark Art Institute is inscribed to my dear master Monsieur careless do all from your affectionate student but it is also a declaration of independence this painting too is much admired at the sawa and one American Journal noted that no American had ever painted with such quiet mastery equalling the French on their own ground Sargent shows careless is a bit of a dandy which I think you can see was sort of careless public persona I'm showing you at the top right Mao's portrait unfinished of careless Duras the the impressions sketch at the upper right and at the the black and white is a photograph of careless so that you can see that sergeant's likeness is very true to nature indeed but also refers very strongly I think to Velazquez's self-portrait a detail from his great painting Las Meninas which I'm showing you at the lower right-hand side of the screen if this thing works no yes anyway lower right and I think careless deliberately cultivated a look that would remind people of the old master that he himself most admired Velasquez whom careless told his students to study ceaselessly which sergeant certainly did sergeant's artistic circle expanded beyond careless though into the realm of more modern art sergeant always walked a fine line between art of the past art that was accepted at a public exhibition like the cell and much more modern art and I'm showing you here on the right at the top surgeons portrait of Monet from the early 1880s and his portrait of Rhoda from about the same time while sergeant never gave up the cell establishment and he never joined the impressionist group he knew many of its members and also other more modern artists and formed lifelong friendships for example with Monet who he is said to have met as early as 1876 and whom he remained friends with throughout his life also with Rodin who is the person who dubbed Sargent the van Dyck of our time sergeants interest in music also brought him close to Frances leading performers and composers and he was also connected to a number of literary figures including this couple Monsieur and Madame Edouard pyro who you see here in a pair of portraits Sargent painted in 1879 the one on the left in the collection of the Corcoran Museum in Washington at least today it is and on the right at the Musee d'Orsay Edward pyro who you see on the right was a poet and a playwright and his wife Marie was the daughter of an important editor of a French literary journal the Pyro's were sergeants first major patrons they regard it sergeant as a rising star probably based on the portraits you've just seen that he showed at the Paris salon he shows Edouard pyro in informal dress you can see that he's wearing sort of an open jacket a shirt untied looking very studiously bohemian if I can put it that by and with the success of the portrait on the right Edouard pyro then commissioned sergeant to paint his wife on the Left done in the countryside at her parents country estate in the Savoy we see in it a sort of stunning disjunction between her formal evening costume and the informal garden setting one critic wrote of this picture that it was favourably strange and he compared it to the literary works of the poet Charl Baudelaire it's interesting to consider that these rather unconventional portraits were displayed in what seems to be a typically cluttered 19th century interior and these photographs have just yesterday come in to my email box through a friend of a friend I think if you look in the mirror in the center of the composition you can see Edouard pyro reflected there and here Madame is reflected in the mirror you can just barely see her head and on the left a portrait I'm just about to talk about but it's interesting to see these portraits in their interior setting Sargent makes the portraits appear so spare but we can see what is a very cluttered typically late 19th century interior setting well the portrait of the little girl and the boy that you can see on the wall in the background is this portrait of the two pyro children painted in 1881 and today in des moines it's a painting later described by Marie Louise pyro the in white as a catastrophy probably because it took supposedly 83 sittings to complete marie-louise recalled the experience as a constant battle between her and sergeant she had a nice silk dress he made her wear cotton stockings she wanted to wear the silk ones some people do also recall that marie louise was sort of a spoiled and bratty child and sergeant seems to have captured her personality the psychological intensity of this portrait and the evident lack of relationship between brother and sister was noted when the painting was exhibited first at the salon in Paris and then in London where no less a personage than Oscar Wilde described it as vicious some scholars have suggested that the mood of this painting reflects sergeants awareness of contemporary theories about children and their distinct psychology other scholars have written about this in comparison to the children that Henry James described in turn of the screw and I'm not going to argue with you that it looks as if Marie Louise Pyrrha could probably bend spoons if she stared at you long enough but if you really look at this painting and think about it it is also a bit of a response to Sargent or our invasion of the privacy of these children something that Sargent explores repeatedly in his work of the early 1880s the disjunction between public and private life and that's I think where your wonderful portrait of Madame escutia comes in painted in 1882 and hanging in your galleries across the way Madame s qu da was the wife of a prominent lawyer and she's standing in what appears to be her living room or the cellar of a very elegant French apartment although it's possible that this could be set in Sargent studio in either case you have the sense of encountering her in a private domain from which she only half emerges halfway between foreground and background between light and shadow between engagement and distance we have a very very different sense of her personality in this picture then we receive from sergeants other image of her now on the left a painting in the collection of the Clark Art Institute made it about the same time a much more public likeness where she looks out at us directly and seems to sparkle in response to our presence in the painting on the Left she's dressed for going out with a black coat and a striking hat dressed for a public experience on the right we're not so sure she's much more reticent and Sergeant continues to explore that border between public and private between portrait and genre scene in another work that I'd like to spend some time talking about and which I think your Madame s qda provides an interesting precedent for and that's sergeants daughters of Edward Darlie Boyd also painted in 1882 and in the collection of the MFA in Boston painted in the fall of 1882 now we see four very plainly dressed American girls in the foyer of their rented apartment on the Avenue des Friedland in Paris out of these relatively unassuming ingredients Sargent created a haunting masterpiece it's an odd painting like let'em s qu da it's suspended between light and dark halfway between a portrait and a genre scene a story that begs to be told but which seems to have no specific narrative it's also very unusual for a portrait we can't see the faces of all of the girls for one thing and most commissioned portraits do at least make an attempt to properly record the features of the sitter's is this in fact a commissioned portrait we have no documentary evidence either way there's no record whatsoever it could have been more of a collaboration between sergeant and his patrons mr. and mrs. Boyd we know that sergeant was looking to create a dramatic painting to show at the salon to follow up on his previous successes there and we also know at this point in his career that he saw out people that he was interested and painting it's possible that when sergeant approached his that sergeant approached his friends the Boyd's with an idea in mind perhaps he'd seen the girls playing in that hallway or it's possible that when the Boyd's approached sergeant to paint a portrait of their daughters that he suggested the idea of making something more ambitious while all portraits are collaborations really collusions between the artist and the sitter and in the case of portraits of children there are other parties involved as well the parents and I'm showing you here mr. and mrs. Boyd Edward Darlie Boyd at the upper left in a painting by the French artist Francois fausse who was Boyd's teacher and at the lower right sergeants later portrait from 1887 of mrs. Boyd well who were this couple and why did they allow Sargent to depict their daughters in such an unusual way well ISA Cushing boy who you see at the lower right came from a wealthy New England family with a fortune that was founded in the China trade and it was her wealth that allowed the Boyd family the freedom to enjoy a peripatetic lifestyle like the Watts 'iz and the sergeant's they moved around Europe uniting and reuniting in various capitals and spas Issa was a vivacious and lively woman with a gift for friendship in fact one family member called her a great noble hearted woman whose foibles and eccentricities added to her charms Henry James it was a close family friend described her as brilliantly friendly and eternally juvenile in 1864 she married Edward Boyd upper-left also of Estonian educated at Harvard and then at Harvard Law he was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1866 after the Civil War or in 1866 67 Ned and Issa boy traveled to Europe for a proper and lengthy tour and boy was impressed not only by Paris but by the world of art in general and he resolved to become an artist they moved to Europe in 1871 Boyd studied first in Rome and then in Paris and they probably met sergeant in either place but likely in Paris in the late 1870s and I'll show you a wonderful example of Boyd's own work from 1883 a watercolor in the MFA's collection showing the Place de la caja in Paris in a very bustling glory I think this is only a few blocks from the Boyd's home well the American colony in Paris was large and it consisted not only of artists but also of writers doctors merchants and many others I'm sure many of you who have read David McCullough's wonderful book describing the American community there the elegant neighborhoods of the 8th arrondissement vank became the location of a number of artistic and literary gatherings at wealthy homes in that area and it's likely through those circles that Sargent and the Boyd's met again Sargent on the left the Boyd's at the right top and at the bottom two figures who may have brought them together the watercolor is sergeant's view image of Henriette ruble a wonderful woman who was an American hostess in Paris and whose salons brought many people together and on the lower right Henry James again friends both of them the boys lived at 32 Avenue to Freedland one of the twelve boulevards that radiates out from the 8th wall or the Arc de Triomphe and I'm showing you in black and white unfortunately Boyd's view of the Arc de Triomphe in 1883 this was a favored neighborhood for wealthy American expatriates who loved Paris but favored the conveniences of all those new apartment buildings that were being built on the right bank in the house mana zation of Paris all the new boulevards that were being constructed Americans would much rather live there in a building with an elevator instead of those really charming but really crumbling on a more authentic older apartments we don't know very much as I said about the circumstances of the commission of this portrait but despite the domestic setting which clearly we have it's possible the portrait was painted again in sergeant's studio and because this is very large painting about eight feet by eight feet it wouldn't have been unusual at all to paint such a large and ambitious work in the studio rather than in the apartment and I can guarantee you and for those of you who have experienced a Parisian elevator this painting would not have fit the painting definitely represents the entrance-hall of the family apartment and again we see this transitional space between public and private that somehow seems particularly appropriate here it we see a front room and then ba in that doorway another room behind it with a fireplace just visible to the left of that red screen a fireplace in that far room that has a mirror hanging over it which reflects light from windows in the background this will all make sense when I show you the layout of an adjacent building which has an apartment built around the same time and you can see that striped chair is in the foyer you can look through a doorway to a fireplace with a mirror over it that reflects light from windows in the background and with the magic of digital imagery we can just plop those faces right there and you can see that sergeant painted the actual space and some of the actual objects as well these are the bases that sergeant painted they stayed in the family and were given to the MFA Boston in 1997 they reflect the contemporary fad in the late 19th century for things Japanese but these faces are not by any means the fine antique porcelains that were admired by connoisseurs instead these are late 19th century Japanese vases made under the sponsorship of Japan's very forward-looking Meiji government specifically manufactured for the Western market from inscriptions on the bottom of them we were known they we know they were made by the Hirabayashi workshop in Arita Japan where they specialized in this kind of blue and white porcelain and these objects were popular in both the United States and in Europe and were shown frequently at World's Fairs in both places Frank Brinkley who is one of the early Western Scholars on Japanese art recognized the difference between this kind of porcelain and fine antiques or between art and fashion and he said and I quote many an American or European amateur flatters himself that in the big obtrusive vases which disfigure his vestibule he has a genuine specimen of Japanese art whereas he has in truth nothing more than a Japanese estimate of his own bad taste but I don't want to dismiss these faces out of hand although I have to tell you that the curators in the Asian Department at the MFA don't like them at all but we like them because they tell us a lot about Sargent as a painter look at the difference between the real vase and the painted version you can see the bird in both we can see how much Sargent left out to show everything would have interfered with the artistic part of sergeant's painting and I just ask you to recall those images of the Pyro's apartment the Boyd's house was probably similarly stuffed with things and fabric and furnishings but Sargent leaves all that out making a very spare composition of four girls and five bases if you count the ones on the mantelpiece in the background well how did Sargent make such a complicated composition well as he so often did he looked both to the old masters and to modern art first of all looking back looking back to that painter that his teacher Fred Carolus had so admired Velasquez and I'm showing you here Velasquez masterpiece Las Meninas on the right from 1656 in the Prado Sargent went to the Prado in 1879 and he copied several works by Velasquez including Las Meninas and we see a lot of compositional similarities between the two paintings the strange diagonals the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of figures and objects the subdued palette the reflected light in the background the mysterious non-narrative composition and indeed when sergeants Boyd daughters was displayed in 1883 one critic called it Velasquez has come to life again but there are also many links between the Boyd's and modern French painting and I'm comparing it here with James T so hide and seek from 18 about 1877 at the National Gallery Sargent new T cells work and similarly T so shows a sort of bourgeois interior although I think you'll agree he includes a lot more stuff than Sargent does but I think it's the link between Sargent and Duga that I find so interesting and not yet fully understood but if anybody wants to contribute to me spending a month or two in Paris I'd be delighted to look into it further I do know that sergeant's name shows up in to Gus notebooks I think the three works by to God that you see on the right-hand side of the screen are interesting in comparison to the Boyd's the Bilal family at the top the modern gas-lit interior that we see in both Sargent and Agha where we also see the same sort of lack of relationship between the figures and family portraits the ballet scene at the center a similar arbitrary arrangement of figures in a box like space with a view into a room Beyond and with the Place de la Concorde at the lower right but Agha you see that same centrifugal composition where the exact center of the canvas is absolutely blank the place that you expect to be the center of attention is empty and all the speck takes place in a circle around it well of course the voids also relates to sergeant's own work and I'm showing you one of his Venetian interiors here from about the same time either 1880 or 1882 we know that sergeant went to Venice twice to devise a picture for the salah to that representative Venetian subject but he never did a full-scale picture for the salah and some scholars suggested that the Boyd's is really sergeant's Venetian picture taken upscale and moved to Paris but you can see by comparing these two images that a lot of the same artistic concerns are explored in both of these pictures the subdued palette the box like spaces the light coming in from the back the mysterious non-narrative composition but at the same time sergeant's painting instead of restricting itself to facts seems to also capture mystery and feelings and one might compare it productively to the unusual literature represented by Alice in Wonderland for example the 19th century's most favorite book for girls which I guarantee you the boy girls had and Sargent sisters had as well a book that explores changes of scale mysterious spaces and mirrors well the mysteries continue to fascinate audiences even 120 years later which i think is one of the reasons this picture is a masterpiece I want to tell you a little bit about what happened to it and what happened to sergeant when it was displayed sergeant first showed the boy daughters at a gallery in Paris the Galerie George petit which you see here on the right in an exterior view and two interiors at the bottom is an international exhibition organized by a dealer and I would just remind you that this is just the moment in the history of art when the Salah system of those great public state-sponsored exhibition starts to break down and the dealer system that we're so familiar with where a dealer will take on an artist's work and show and market them was just beginning to get going well sergeant had hoped to show this one at George petit and then to show a different set of portraits for the salon of 1883 but those portraits weren't finished and so sergeant showed the it's there instead sergeants father wrote John has sent to the salon a portrait or rather for portraits of children in one picture a comment that predicted what critics would say about the work I'm showing it to you here with the satiric cartoon that was published and Sargent wasn't the only one who was satisfies din this way there was a whole magazine of these kinds of cartoons and what it says at the bottom in French is grande unpacking of porcelains Chinese objects children's toys etc etc the girls now appearing as dolls on sticks and the random arrangement being compared to what happens when you just move in and everything's all higgledy-piggledy well the likenesses of the girls were priced and sergeants ability as a painter was priced but everybody thought this composition was entirely strange they were mystified by the lack of connection between the girls one critic said it looked like it had been composed according to the rules of a game called the four corners game which was sort of like musical chairs you just were wherever you were when the music stopped one critic called it four corners and avoid one America and magazine said it represents a little girl a baby a half a girl about five eighths of a girl and two tall Japanese vases spotted about in a vast expanse of canvas all of this is very well as showing the artists clever manipulation of effects but what in the world has it to do with portraiture well sergeant answered that the next year at the salon when the two paintings that he had first planned to show in 1883 were finally ready to show in 1884 they were portraits of two American women in Paris one in white and one in black delays had prevented Sargent from showing them in eighty-three or a sergeant wrote to Daisy white the woman on the left in March 1883 I have been brushing away at both of you for the last three weeks in a horrible state of anxiety well the as I said these two pictures became the salon entry for 1884 and first I want to tell you about this one Mrs Henry white now in the collection of the Corcoran Daisy Stuyvesant Rutherford white had commissioned Sargent to paint her portrait after his success at the salon of 1882 she was the wife of a well-known New York astronomer I'm sorry the daughter of a New York astronomer and the wife of an American diplomat she was a prominent member of the American community in Paris and this was sergeant's first important Commission outside of his own circle of friends and family and colleagues mrs. white was described by Henry James as very handsome young rich splendid and she's never read a book in her life Sargent depicted her in an elegant white gown holding a fan in one hand and opera glasses in the other as if she were about to leave for an evening entertainment and when the portrait was displayed in Paris for the second time in May 1885 again at the Galerie George petit a French critic described it as a little empty and you kind of have the sense that it was about both the sitter and the painting that he might have referred and it's this conflation of sitter and painting that I want you to keep in mind of subject and object this was commonplace and I think it's as something that Sargent suffered double indemnity when he painted the lady in black now on the screen you may not realize that Madame eeks as she's known or the portrait of Madame Rolle is actually the portrait of an American woman this is Virginia Vainio Gautreaux an American woman from New Orleans who moved to Paris with her mother after her father died in the Civil War she married a parisian banker and she was known as a professional beauty a celebrated and self-conscious belle the American painter Edward Simmons who was then a student in Paris described her and I quote she was black as spades and white as milk something about her gave you the impression of infinite proportion infinite grace and infinite balance every artist wanted to portray her in marble or in paint well sergeant was completely fascinated with her and this is one example of Sargent pursuing someone he was interested in painting she did not Commission this portrait he pursued her and he was fascinated with her cameo like profile which he rendered multiple times this is a tiny sketch of Madame Gautreaux now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and here you see two preparatory drawings and a watercolor of her wearing that same gown all in the collection of the Harvard Art Museum's as I said he became obsessed with her and finally convinced her to let him paint her portrait which he looked worked on for a very long time you may gather from these sketches that she was an uncooperative sitter and Sergeant struggled to find the right pose working over and over again in pencil watercolor and oil here's an image of the portrait as it was displayed at the cell in 1884 look at the strap off the shoulder here are some cartoons again sergeant wasn't the only one singled out that way the one I particularly like is the one on the right which there's at the bottom new model for the Ace of Hearts and what I would suggest to you is that critics likely could not wait to say to Madam Gautreau's portrait what they would never say to her face sergeant's friend Vernon Lee described this painting at the silo as surrounded by shoals of astonished and jiving women one critic wrote of it of all the ladies in undress the only one of interest is sergeants interesting for its attention to the fine profile reminiscent of Piero della Francesca a good thing interesting for its decolletage and its chains of silver which are indecent and give the impression that they are about to fall down interesting for the powder that makes her skin cadaverous and clownish at the same time many Parisians professed to be shocked by sergeant's portrait it's really really hard for me to believe that the French could be shocked by something as subtle as one strap down here's a group of other things that have been shown at the salon in the recent past or that were shown that year at the upper-left Carbonell one of the leading academic painters showing a German countess taking down the her shoulder strap a painting now at the Hermitage the two black-and-whites were ladies and countless evening straps as a friend of mine likes to call them that were shown in the same cell as Madame X on the right Bono's portrait of important Parisian socialite from 1878 off also with an off-the-shoulder black dress and at the lower center in color careless Duras madam madam was a loss see a painting that was shown in the late 1870s at the sella and by its pose could not help but recall the two Goya's that you see at the bottom in black and white the clothed and naked maja what could be more suggestive than a reference to a portrait of a naked person there were plenty of off-the-shoulder black dresses and seductive poses at the cell and one of the most famous paintings in town was this one by on reserve ex called rola showing a fallen woman in her bed of shame based on a poem by Alfred a moose a the JFX painting was not shown at the salon was rejected but was immediately shown in public at a commercial establishment and was extremely well known well what to make then of sergeants what's now looking as a relatively modest madam acts sergeant had shown Madame Gautreaux as she wanted to be seen as a quintessential Piscean sophisticated perfectly groomed elegantly dressed urban independent I'm showing you a painting on the right made also in 1883 by a French artist Charles E wrong that's actually entitled la keynesian and you can see that it bears a lot of resemblance to Madame X although she's dressed for an afternoon rather than an evening but what was one to make of a please en who was not French I would propose to you that the real issue here is national pride a premonition of the hostile reception accorded to sergeants portrait appeared in 1881 in the society journal the despacio cynical if humorous words were sparked that year when America and when an American horse won the Grand Prix at law shop for the first time and in that magazine the columnist wrote I know since the victory of Fox Hall Fox Hall was the horse one determined French Patriot who can no longer without a lot of grumbling even say the name America he finds the Yankees a bit unbecoming they have painters who carry off our metals like mr. Sargent beautiful women who eclipse ours like Madame Gautreaux and horses that beat our steeds it's a peaceful war but they come to hoist their victory colors over our land well sergeant and Madame Gautreaux both had similar aims they wanted to be the best not just in the American colony but in all of Paris and to a great extent they both succeeded the most beautiful woman the most skilled painter but there was one obstacle they could never conquer you could never become French well Madame goat rose mother cried that her daughter had been lost and while Madame Gautreaux did indeed retreat from society from a time she recovered enough later to have her portrait painted again by Gustave Courtois a French painter note the strap Sargeant recovered but it took him a while he was taken quite off-guard by the hostile response to this painting and he took advantage of a commission that he had already received before the 1884 salon to paint a number of portraits in England of the Vickers family eventually he moves to London where he maintained his studio for the rest of his life although he did continue to send portraits to Paris for exhibition and display and he maintained many friendships and connections there you see him standing in his Paris studio with the finished portrait of Madame X you can see also that he repainted the strap and possibly also the background and I bring back the wood engraving from the salon and also the watercolor because if you look really carefully at the painting itself when you see it at the Metropolitan Museum you can see that it's very heavily worked and in some of the cracking that's around that around her face where he's emphasised the profile you can see little hints of blue and I've begun to wonder whether he also repainted the background and whether the background initially was the same teal blue that we see in the watercolor sergeant kept this portrait until 1915 when after Madame goat Rose death he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum as I said early in 1884 before that infamous Salah Henry James that encouraged Sargent to explore London and he accepted a portrait to paint many members of the Vickers family and I'm showing you one of the numerous portraits of Vickers is here this one from 1884 now in Sheffield well when sergeant showed this portrait of the mrs. Vickers in London it was criticized for being and I quote beastly French and in response I really believe that Sargeant reinvented himself as an English painter with works like these on the left carnation Lily Lily rose from 1885 86 now at the Tate and on the right lady Agnew from 1892 from the National Gallery of Scotland in portraits like these Sargent consciously is adopting the preferred vocabulary of an English painter on the left the aesthetic tapestry like a floral background the title carnation Lily Lily Rose drawn from a popular British song it the painting was a huge success and was purchased immediately for the nation sergeants portrait of gertrude vernon lady Agnew on the right was the painting that confirmed his reputation as a portraitist in England and in it we see that Sargent had turned to English history for his pictorial inspiration adopting his his model the sort of poetic half length portraits by great British artists like Reynolds and his contemporaries sergeants seductive fare woman in her 18th century chair is modelled at least in part on these 18th century British prototypes positioning both sergeant and his sitter as successors to a beloved national tradition while sergeants reinvention and reinvigoration of these British aesthetics were an irresistible formula and soon sitters began to flock to sergeant's London studio eventually as one critic said he had all London at his feet but that's another lecture thank you

Channel: The Art Institute of Chicago

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Length: 49min 27sec (2967 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 15 2014