John Singer Sargent (1856 to 1925) is surely among the most visually pleasurable, sumptuous and sophisticated of Victorian artists. Born in Italy to American parents, he studied at places around the Continent and had made his name in Paris in the early 1880s, not least with the scandalous portrait of Virginie Amélie Gautreau, Madame X from 1884, before settling in Britain in 1886. During the later 1880s and 90s Sargent established himself as the leading portrait painter of his day. His astonishing virtuosity amazed contemporaries and still dazzle to this day. In ‘Ena and Betty’ marvel at the juxtaposition, from left to right, of velvet, satin and porcelain – it is a technical tour de force.
Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer by John Singer Sargent (1901) Tate. Photo © Tate (Joe Humphrys)
This is a major exhibition of Sargent’s work selected to focus on the dress and clothes his many sitters wore for their portraits. It investigates in great detail how Sargent worked with his sitters to select clothes, drapes, wraps, hats, fans and other accoutrements to maximise the impact of each portrait. In fact the unique selling point of the show is that next to many of the portraits, they’ve put on display the original dresses, hats, fans and so on which feature in the portraits.
Installation view of ‘Sargent and Fashion’ showing the portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer (1889 to 1890) at centre, flanked by dresses from the House of Worth. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)
Objects
Thus there are display cases in every room, making it feel more like an exhibition at the V&A than an art exhibition per se. Because I like counting, I made a list:
- 8 dresses
- 2 fans
- 1 top hat (as worn by Lord Ribblesdale)
- 1 opera cloak
- 1 lace collar
- 1 shawl
- 1 sample of batik fabric
- 8 photos
- 1 video, a 20 second silent black and white film made by Thomas Edison of Carmencita Dancing from 1894
- a display case showing the regalia worn by Charles Stewart, sixth Marquess of Londonderry, at the coronation of Edward VII 1904, next to Sargent’s imposing portrait of the Marquess
The photos are used for various purposes: the portrait of Mrs Montgomery Sears (1899) is displayed alongside not only her own dresses but also her photographs of Sargent at work, while ‘Mrs Fiske Warren and her Daughter Rachel’ (1903) is shown alongside fascinating (and rather blurred) photos documenting the portrait sittings in process.
Haute couture
Sargent’s career coincided with the rise of haute couture (defined as ‘exclusive custom-fitted high-end fashion design’) and Sargent’s very rich clients were often among the top customers of the leading fashion houses of Europe. In the social circles he painted, clothes bore a complex system of codes and meanings and one of the interests of the exhibition is reading, in the wall labels, how the decisions made by individual sitters bore precise and carefully weighted meanings and values i.e. analyses of the subtle messages everything you wore sent out in that time and place.
Installation view of ‘Sargent and Fashion’ showing, on the left, the costume worn by La Carmencita around 1890, made of silk, net, beads and sequins (Private Collection © Houghton Hall) and, on the right, Sargent’s portrait of La Carmencita from 1890. Paris, musée d’Orsay. Photo © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
(‘La Carmencita’ depicts 21-year-old Spanish dancer Carmen Dauset Moreno, who performed in music halls across the United States, Europe, and South America.)
So the exhibition’s appeals are:
1. Sheer number of Sargent paintings
It contains 60 enormous Singer Sargent paintings, all painted with consummate skill, which are worth revelling in for their beauty alone.
2. Dresses and accessories
About ten of the paintings are displayed next to the original dress, hat, fan, cloak, shawl and so on, which feature in the painting, and so it is fascinating to compare the real-life object with its depiction in the magic world of art.
One simple conclusion which comes over is that the objects all appear very small compared to their depiction in some of these enormous wall-sized painting. This is particularly true of the elaborate green dress worn by Ellen Terry. The painting is enormous, statuesque and, girded by its golden frame, dominates the space. The dress is amazingly small. The waist in particular, was so tiny I felt I could probably almost put my two hands around it.
Installation view of ‘Sargent and Fashion’ showing Sargent’s imposing portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth alongside the original beetle-wing dress she’s wearing in the painting. Photo © Tate (Jai Monaghan)
3. Fashion
The wall labels give an enormous amount of information about late-19th century haute couture, high fashion, dresses and dress-making. For example the several wall labels which tell us a lot about the House of Worth, with a photo of the founder and an explanation of what made him so important and sought after.
4. Rarities
Adding to the point about lots of Sargent paintings, an additional appeal of the show is that there are lots of rare and obscure Sargent paintings on loan. The standard favourites (‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, ‘Ena and Betty’, ‘Dr Pozzi’, ‘Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth’ and so on) are owned by Tate and usually on permanent display. More than the clothes angle, what appealed to me was the opportunity to see lots of wonderful Sargent paintings which are rarely on public view or loaned from overseas and are, more often than not, of quite exquisite, shimmering brilliance.
Mrs Hugh Hammersley by John Singer Sargent (1892) Lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
5. Social history
For once the old cliché is true, for every picture here really does tell a story. All the wall labels give pen portraits of the sitter, who they were, why they were rich enough to commission a Sargent portrait, how he and the sitter worked together to choose outfits, poses and backgrounds, and much more. In this respect the exhibition is a sustained look into the lives of the richest people in Britain at the peak of the British Empire, fascinating stuff for fans of the social history, gossip, clothes, marriages and relationships of the elite of that period. Here’s one example, the caption to the Ena and Betty portrait at the top of this review, to give a flavour:
Ena and Betty Wertheimer were the eldest daughters of Asher Wertheimer, a successful London art dealer, and his wife Flora. Their father commissioned paintings of the entire family, making him one of Sargent’s most important patrons. The two women posed for Sargent in the drawing room of their home. Betty wears a red velvet evening gown and holds an open fan. Ena, who is dressed in shiny white satin, began studying at the Slade School of Art shortly after this portrait was painted. She later ran a gallery in London.
Countless interesting titbits like this.
Gender
It wouldn’t be a Tate exhibition if the curators didn’t take the opportunity to lecture us about gender or race. I’m surprised they didn’t make more of the fact that Sargent’s career coincided with the peak of the British Empire, given their keenness to anathematise the British Empire whenever possible, nor to point out how frightfully white all these sitters are, as they do in plenty of other exhibitions.
They do, however, take the opportunity to shoehorn in some stuff about gender. In fact room 4 is devoted to the subject. I’ll quote the wall label in full:
Fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity exerted a strong influence on the society in which Sargent worked. He conformed to these expectations in commissioned portraits such as that of the Harvard benefactor Henry Lee Higginson, who appears as the epitome of virile manliness. In his more personal works, however, Sargent was drawn to sitters who used clothing to subvert these conventions, and embraced the expressive possibilities of clothing. Male sitters were depicted in traditionally feminine spaces or in unconventional clothing. Women in his paintings often wore clothes associated with men, either as playful masquerade or as wholesale rejection of gender conventions, such as Vernon Lee, on display here.
I smiled at the implication that ‘fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity’ somehow applied only in the society of Sargent’s time, as if it was a rare exception from the best practice of gender fluidity and multiple genders which we now enjoy – whereas the truth is the exact opposite, that the extreme gender fluidity of our own day (a full list of modern gender identities) is a very recent development which even now only exists in certain spaces in contemporary society, and that ‘fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity’ have been the norm throughout most of human history in most parts of the world.
Pride of place in this room, and to support this thesis, goes to Sargent’s magnificent portrait of Ena Wertheimer sub-titled ‘A Vele Gonfie’, which is Italian for ‘in full sail’, or ‘with gusto’, designed to capture the energy and enthusiasm of the woman. How much this portrait ‘subverts’ the ‘fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity’ of his day I leave the reader to decide.
Portrait of Ena Wertheimer: A Vele Gonfie by John Singer Sargent (1904) Tate. Photo © Tate (Oliver Cowling)
Conservative
My own view would be that, far from subverting anything, Sargent’s work is extremely conservative in a number of obvious ways: one, he depicts the rich of his day as unquestioningly glamorous and entitled; there is no inkling anywhere of any satirical attitude, not even in private sketches or diaries. He was a fan of the rich and the social order they controlled.
Two, he reinforced the existing social hierarchy in every painting he made, overtly so in depictions of members of the establishment such as the magnificently haughty Lord Ribblesdale and especially so in the portrait of Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry, carrying the Great Sword of State at the coronation of King Edward VII, in August 1902. Doesn’t come more conservative, more bolstering the establishment, than images like these.
Three, contrary to what the curators have just stated, almost all the paintings are a) of women and b) portray them as fabulous objects of conventional beauty, display and ornament, sheathed in phenomenally expensive dresses, festooned with jewellery, necklaces, ear-rings and so on, depicting women as fabulous objects to be admired and envied. Is this painting of a beautiful woman swathed in gorgeous fabrics ‘subverting’ ‘fixed ideas of masculinity and femininity’?
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1864 to 1932) by John Singer Sargent (1892) National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased with the aid of the Cowan Smith Bequest Fund 1925
Not really…and neither do most of the solidly conservative, very gender-unfluid portraits on show here.
Finally, Sargent’s painting style. It’s so obvious that the curators don’t comment on it but Sargent was, arguably, the last magnificent gasp of the pre-modern world of painting. In 1905, the year after Sargent painted Ena Wertheimer and Lord Londonderry, the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge) was formed in Dresden and the French modernist group, les Fauves (The Wild Beasts), was founded by André Derain and Henri Matisse. The future of art had arrived.
The curators make some fascinating comments about Sargent’s phenomenal ability with oil paint, at one point noting his interest in and skills with the colour black which explains his enthusiasm for Old Masters of black:
The contemporary vogue for black clothing enabled Sargent to create portraits that were both modern and in dialogue with this tradition. The introduction of aniline (synthetic) dyes in the mid-19th century resulted in an intense pure black, patented in 1863, that enabled a new depth of colour. Sargent’s heroes, meanwhile, included two 17th century masters of black: Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and Dutch artist Frans Hals. Indeed, the colour was so integral to his work that, when visiting his friend, French artist Claude Monet, Sargent was unable to work upon learning that Monet did not have any black paint.
I found this kind of insight fascinating and the exhibition is full of them. But, as I say, Sargent can be seen as representing the acme, under perfect social conditions and in a society of unparalleled wealth, of an art form mostly dedicated to portraying and validating the very rich – monarchs, aristocrats and the new wealthy of the second industrial revolution – using techniques refined over centuries and centuries of craftsmanship (Hals, Velasquez) – most of which were just about to be jettisoned by the revolutionaries poised to invent modern art and create an entirely new climate and context and meaning for art and aesthetics.
Sargent’s kind of technically fluent, traditionalist portrait painting continued on between the wars but is rarely exhibited or discussed, and I’m always interested to see examples when it is. But by 1918 it had been rendered redundant by the dazzling achievements of all manner of modernisms exploding all across Europe, and dwindled into an attractive, proficient but irrelevant backwater.
Conclusion
‘Sargent and Fashion’ is a big, well-staged and fascinating exhibition. This impressive gathering together of paintings and garments certainly succeeds in the curators’ aim of ‘offering a new generation and those already familiar with his work the chance to discover and reconsider Sargent and his enduring influence.’ Well done, Tate.
But I had one last quibble or query. I’ve known and loved several of Sargent’s greatest hits (such as the above-mentioned ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’, ‘Ena and Betty’, ‘Dr Pozzi’) for decades. And yet something odd happened to them in this exhibition – they lost their power. In its position in the permanent display, ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ knocks me off my feet every time I see it. When ‘Dr Pozzi’ appeared in an exhibition of Sargent’s portraits at the National Portrait Gallery I was stunned and staggered and spent some time in front of it, soaking up its hypnotic power.
For some reason both of these old favourites, as well as others I love, failed to make the same impact in this exhibition. Was it the light? The way they were hung among a lot of similar works? Days later I’m still puzzling over why they failed to make their usual impact.
Related links
- Sargent and Fashion continues at Tate Britain until 7 July 2024
Books & Boots 
jane gardiner
/ March 25, 2024to quibble – Lady Agnew is owned by Scottish National Gallery, not the Tate. She is one of my favourite Sargeant’s as she looks as if she has some wit, and I was really disappointed when I started to travel more and realised not all of his paintings are as good.
Simon
/ March 25, 2024H Jane. Thanks for your correction. Maybe not all Sargent’s paintings are great but his best ones are magnificent. Best wishes, Simon