John Singer Sargent is known for his portraits with their gorgeous colours, attention to detail and acute delineation of character. To be painted by Sargent signified that you’d arrived and had the means to pay the 1000 guineas fee. With his superb technique, he could make his female sitters beautiful and his male sitters commanding, aided by the careful construction and manipulation of fabric, clothes, and accessories for pictorial effect.
This is the main thrust of Tate Britain’s exhibition entitled Sargent and Fashion which explores the connection between Sargent’s portraiture and the fashions of the day. These portraits are gathered from different collections as well as clothes and accessories. The displays show how much Sargent’s portraiture was very much of its time and the clothes the women were wearing were at the forefront of fashion. His brushwork recalls two of the great artists of the past – Diego Velazquez and Frans Hals especially with his subjects wearing black clothing. Another interesting aspect is that Sargent focused on the clothes primarily and all his women sitters were wearing minimal to no jewellery. The famous portrait of Madame X was focused on her clothes and pose, the only jewellery is she’s wearing is her wedding ring.
There are two main ironies we find with Sargent’s portraits. On the surface his sitters were part of the great and the good of America or Britain but on closer inspection, he painted relatively few members of the British aristocracy, and they were mostly those who married in. His American sitters were mostly drawn from the upper middle classes and nouveau riche. He also painted lots of Jewish sitters and in my opinion, they were the best of Sargent’s works (apart from artists and writers). Perhaps it’s because as an outsider himself, he could empathise with them; his portraits of the daughters of art dealer Asher Wertheimer – Ena, Betty, and Almina – sizzle with life and depict an intimacy that could only come with a close friendship that is noticeably absent in the other commissioned works in the exhibition.
Another irony is demonstrated with his portrait of Pauline Astor, the daughter of William Waldorf Astor. The family were newcomers to Britain and Sargent didn’t want to advertise Pauline’s nouveau riche background by dressing her simply. However, by doing her portrait in the style of Thomas Gainsborough, Sargent unwittingly ends up advertising the fact that she’s from a nouveau riche family; the Astors had no ancestral portraits to speak of so Pauline Astor is depicted in the style of one. Pauline gazes at the viewer with some diffidence – very unlike the confidence and assurance exhibited in the rest of the portraits, even those of children. These are people who are sure of their place in society and have no doubts about deserving that place and making the most of it.
The exhibition is well laid out and curated but suffers from the disease that infects museums, heritage sites and historic homes today: which is the usual bellyaching over either slavery, colonialism, or gender. One example of this is the caption of Sargent’s portrait of the author Robert Louis Stevenson which mentions his wife who is reclined on a sofa dressed in an Indian style garb. The caption reads: “During the Victorian era, many people wore clothes from other cultures. Regardless of the wearer’s intentions, they often betrayed a disregard for the cultures from which the garments originated.” Which begs the question, how do the curators know what the intention was? Is it the usual projecting 21st century views over a 19th century painting? Or is this the curators trying to be big and clever? Either way, the caption is very unhelpful and certainly patronising.
A portrait of another Jewish sitter Sybil Marchioness of Cholmondeley closes the exhibition. Sargent stopped accepting commissions for portraits after 1910 preferring to concentrate on landscapes and the large-scale canvases during the First World War. The portraits and clothes in this exhibition give us a glimpse of a vanished world that have long ago passed into history.
Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain until 7 July 2024. For more information please visit https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/sargent-and-fashion
The bloggers visited the exhibition on 29 February 2024. Photos taken by bloggers.
Enough of this Tomfoolery! 