WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS. -- John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was considered by many in his lifetime the greatest painter of his era, but his reputation has fluctuated since his death. For years he was dismissed as a facile portraitist of the international glitterati, unworthy of ranking among the top, serious artists. Recently there has been a resurgence of appreciation for his bravura technique, elegant compositions and perceptive portraits, and admiration for his spontaneous, luminous watercolors.

A spate of exhibitions in this country and England over the next several years should solidify Sargent's high standing among the world's painters, certainly among American artists. Interest in his work on both sides of the Atlantic reflects his expatriate existence - he was born and lived his life abroad, but never gave up his American citizenship - and the sheer brilliance of his art.

These exhibitions are bound to increase understanding that, in addition to being a graceful and gifted artist, Sargent was an energetic practitioner and an astute judge of the art markets of his day. Intelligence and hard work was behind the appearance of effortlessness that surrounded his ascent to international acclaim.

Sargent painted both for success, which he achieved in ample measure, and for posterity. A number of his best works merit enduring recognition as masterpieces. His large, lovely canvas, "Cashmere," (1908) fetched $11.1 million at Sotheby's last year, the highest price ever paid for a pre-World War II American painting at auction.

The splendid exhibition at the newly expanded Clark Art Institute through September 7 examines how Sargent launched his career by means of a deliberate international campaign to shape public perceptions of his work and make a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic. Shrewdly sizing up the exhibition practices and patronage systems of the day, the ambitious young painter manipulated the market and attracted public attention, sometimes too much.

The Clark exhibition encompasses the period from 1877, when the 21-year-old artist made his debut at the Paris Salon, to 1887, when he relocated to England and made his first professional visit to the United States. On view are 35 Sargent works, including some of his finest canvases, from public and private collections. Not displayed are two key works from this early phase, "El Jaleo" (1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) and "The Daughters of Edward D. Boit" (1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), both fortunately available to viewers in New England. Their absence, while regrettable, is more than made up for by the sizable number of masterworks Sargent created as his career took off.

Acute Observation

The plethora of outstanding works from the young artist helps explain his friend Henry James' acute observation at the end of Sargent's successful initial decade that his art offered the "slightly `uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn."

It is a fitting title for the exhibition.

The informative, fully illustrated 240-page catalogue of the same title as the show (Yale University Press, hardcover $40), contains entries on each work in the exhibition and a fascinating appendix delineating Sargent's exhibition history, in France, America, England, and elsewhere, 1877-1887.

It has a perceptive forward by the artist's great-nephew, Richard Ormond, director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. An essay by H. Barbara Weinberg of the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers interesting insights into Sargent's tutelage by French painter Carolus-Duran.

The curator of the show, Marc Simpson, former curator of American paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, now based in Williamstown with the Getty Information Institute, weighs in with a chapter on Sargent's relations with his critics and how they perceived him and his oeuvre.

Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, in 1856 into the somewhat financially reduced branch of a prosperous New England mercantile family. He spent his childhood traveling on the Continent and in England accompanying his restless, socially ambitious parents. His father had abandoned a promising medical practice in Philadelphia and his mother was an accomplished musician and amateur artist.

During young Sargent's peripatetic existence he received little formal education, but his experiences as an itinerant tourist enriched him artistically, culturally and socially. His boyhood interest in drawing led to early art lessons in Italy, and he sketched from nature as he roamed around Europe with his family.

In 1874, Sargent went to Paris, where he continued his training under the popular portraitist Carolus-Duran. He taught his students to paint directly on the canvas, conveying essential features of their subjects through spontaneous brushwork, a subdued palette and vivid contrasts between light and dark. Sargent also studied drawing for four years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but it was Carolus-Duran's method that formed the aesthetic basis of his mature style.

As he developed his skills, young Sargent cast a hungry eye on the Parisian art world, particularly the annual Salon, where up-and-coming artists could establish their standing. Properly concluding that genre work by a newcomer was more likely to be popular at the Salon than a fashionable portrait, Sargent created a portfolio of sketches of fisherfolk during a summer on the Brittany coast in 1877.

Acclaimed Canvases

Back in his Paris studio he executed two brightly colored, carefully brushed oil depictions of a group of fish-wives and children crossing a beach carrying baskets. He sent one canvas, "Oyster Gatherers of Cancale," (1878) to the inaugural exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York (his first painting to be shown in the United States) and the other version, twice its size, to the Salon of 1878. Acclaimed by observer's in both locations, these light-filled canvases marked Sargent's initial effort to gain international attention. His next success was an engaging, perceptive portrait of Carolus-Duran. It won an honorable mention at the 1879 salon. This striking image is now in the collection of the Clark Art Institute.

In a clear bid for Salon attention with a large portrait of a fashionable Parisian, Sargent posed the regal Madame Edouard Pailleron (1879) strolling on the spacious lawn of her family estate. It drew mixed reviews at the 1880 Salon. Two years later, after 83 sittings, the artist completed a brushy depiction of the two Pailleron children, Edouard and Marie-Louise. The double portrait attracted the kind of favorable comment Sargent sought at the Salon of 1881.

One of the show-stoppers at the Clark, also from its collection, is the mesmerizing "Fumee d'ambre gris" (1880). Growing out of a two month visit to Tangier, it shows a mysterious North African woman infusing her capacious white robe and her senses with ambergris fumes from a burning censer at her feet. A hit at the 1880 Salon, this nuanced symphony of creams and whites remains a memorable image.

During several extended painting forays to Venice, 1880-82, Sargent executed a series of remarkable works focusing on women in black shawls pursuing their daily routines in darkened alleyways and cool, expansive interiors. In contrast to his contemporaries, who tended to depict the Italian city as a bright and cheerful place, Sargent's dour canvases suggest he was experimenting with color harmonies and compositional strategies.

The canvas of the Boit girls, an enormous tour de force, attracted much attention when displayed at the Salon of 1882. Showing the young offspring of wealthy New Englanders in their spacious Paris apartment, it was unusual for its unconventional placement of figures, dark palette and dramatically lit space. It was inspired by Velazquez's revered "Las Meninas," which Sargent had copied at the Prado in 1879-80.

Sargent's immersion in the culture and ambience of Andalusia led to one of his greatest masterpieces, "El Jaleo." Specifically executed for the Salon of 1882, it took the academics by storm. The focal point of a much-admired exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in 1992, "El Jaleo" was eventually acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner. It now occupies a special niche in the Boston museum bearing her name.

Although he enjoyed considerable early success with his landscapes, figure studies and genre scenes, Sargent knew that the way to get to the top in a hurry lay in eye-catching portraiture. His first life-size, full-length male portrait was the bold and appealing "Dr Pozzi at Home" (1881) showing the distinguished surgeon preening in a bright, floor-length red dressing gown before a dark background. Among those praising this daring work was Henry James.

Love Blooms

Sargent's other entry at the 1882 Salon, designed to contrast with the theatrical "El Jaleo," was a charming likeness of Charlotte Louise Burkhardt, a 20-year-old Swiss-American living in Paris. "Lady with the Rose" (1882), a life-size canvas now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, depicts the young woman in a long black dress, holding a white flower, and gazing directly at the viewer.

Burkhardt was apparently the only woman with whom Sargent was romantically linked. But when push came to shove, he "decided it was not for him and scuttled for safety," according to relative Ormond. They stayed good friends, but Sargent remained a lifelong bachelor.

The expatriate American's steady climb to the top of the French art world ended with the unveiling of his notorious likeness of Madame Virginie Avegno Gatreau at the Salon of 1884. A famed beauty and social butterfly, the Louisiana-born wife of a Parisian banker caught Sargent's eye at various gatherings in the City of Light. He saw in her unorthodox approach to fashion, strong posture and powdered skin a new opportunity to make a splash at the Salon.

His depiction of her in haughty profile, wearing a black decollete dress on which one strap had slipped off her shoulder, was slyly entitled "Madame X" (1884), even though all Paris knew who she was. The daring realism of the depiction, combined with its palpable sensuality, scandalized even sophisticated Parisians, who concluded that Sargent had at last gone too far. Sensing disaster, Sargent painted the wandering strap back in place, but the damage had been done. The painting is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum.

The ensuing tempest stunned Sargent. He recognized that his audacious effort to challenge the conventions of portraiture had backfired, dooming his calculated campaign to achieve artistic and financial success in France. Deciding to abandon Paris as his base, he considered moving to Boston or New York, but finally decided that London would be the most congenial place for his future operations. He settled there permanently in 1886.

At the outset, Sargent was regarded with suspicion, his work denigrated as too French and too modern for conservative British tastes. But working with intelligence and dedication, he soon flourished with a new outpouring of canvases.

Breakthrough Work

The breakthrough painting that won over skeptical Britons was "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (1887), a masterful, glowing composition of two girls in white dresses lighting Oriental paper lanterns in a darkening garden. Charmed by the picture's bright colors, decorative touches and deft handling of light and mood, Britons hailed it unreservedly at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1887. Following the triumph of this large masterwork, now owned by London's Tate Gallery, Sargent was recognized as the preeminent Impressionist in England.

Following a stay in Boston in the late 1880s, which stirred American interest in his work, Sargent became the portrait painter of choice among the well-to-do in Gilded Age America, as well as the British aristocracy. In contrast to the prosaic academic style of his British counterparts, Sargent's grand manner approach, buttery brushwork, flattering personality insights and virtuosity in capturing the sheen of gowns and drapery captivated the beautiful people of his time. Sargent also excelled as a watercolorist, perhaps the finest of his time after Winslow Homer.

In the final decades of his career, weary of catering to the whims of sitters, Sargent gave up portrait painting in favor of plein air landscapes, genre pictures and mural work. He spent years laboring on expansive murals at the Boston Public Library and Boston's Museum of Fine Art, which he hoped - in vain, it turns out - would secure for him an even loftier reputation.

Showered with honors in Britain and America, Sargent was claimed by each country as its own. When he died of heart failure in London in 1925, elaborate memorial services were held at Westminster Abbey. He is buried in Surrey.

Sargent's reputation lost some of its luster following his death. Critics disparaged his technical virtuosity, his materialism, his allegiance to rich sitters, his adherence to European tradition, and his anti-modernist attitudes. The general public, on the other hand, has always liked his work.

In recent years, art scholars and curators have taken another look at Sargent's large body of work and many have expressed appreciation for his bravura oil paintings and luminous watercolors. While some critics continue to maintain that he was too facile, many recognize that making art look spontaneous was his genius.

Ongoing Interest

The appealing, focused, scholarly Clark exhibition is the first of a number of shows and publications celebrating Sargent over the next several years. The National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh will mount "The Portrait of a Lady: Sargent and Lady Agnew" (through October 19). The show centers on that alluring likeness which did so much to clinch the artist's standing as England's leading portraitist when it was displayed at the Royal Academy in 1893.

Adelson Galleries (Mark Hotel, 25 East 77th Street in Manhattan) has organized "Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes" (November 7-December 13), comprised of more than 45 paintings and watercolors executed by Sargent in Venice, along the Mediterranean and in the Alps during a somewhat overlooked phase of his career, 1900-14.

This fall Yale University Press will issue the first of a multi-volume Sargent catalogue raisonne by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurry.

In the fall of 1998 the Tate Gallery in London will present a Sargent retrospective of 150 works. It will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in February, 1999, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1999. During the latter showing, the Gardner Museum plans a complementary exhibition featuring "El Jaleo."