"Madame X," 1883-84. Sargent's most famous work featured Madame Pierre Gautreau, nee Virginia Avegno, an American from New Orleans who married French banker Pierre Gautreau. It is significant that the diamond crescent she wears in the portrait, the symbol of the goddess Diana, was not Sargent's invention, but an aspect of her own self-promotion and display. Her gown's right shoulder strap was originally worn slipped, and this provocative dress was shocking to the Paris Salon exhibition audience who had the first peek at the work. Sargent eventually agreed to sell the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to whose director he wrote in 1916: "I suppose it is the best thing I have done."

 

John Singer Sargent

at The National Gallery of Art

By Stephen May

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Considered by many to be the greatest painter of his era, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has had a fluctuating reputation since his death. In some respects the victim of his own ostentatious technical brilliance, over the years critics have contended that his work was too facile, aristocratic and superficial to stand the test of time.

Recently there has been growing appreciation for his extraordinary achievements and the special quality of his oeuvre, sentiments that are bound to be enhanced by a splendid exhibition now on tour in the United States. It should put to rest quibbles about Sargent's work and assure him a place at the very front ranks of American artists.

"John Singer Sargent," the first major retrospective since a memorial exhibition in 1926, comprises over 100 paintings, watercolors and works on paper, including many of his most beautiful and important works. It was organized by London's Tate Gallery where it opened last fall; the National Gallery of Art, where it will be seen through May 31; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where it can be viewed from June 23 to September 26.

Curated by Sargent's great-nephew, Richard Ormond, director of England's National Maritime Museum, and Elaine Kilmurray, co-author with Ormond of the Sargent catalogue raisonne, the show assembles works from every phase of the artist's career. Kilmurray and Ormond's exhibition catalogue is outstanding, with 200 reproductions and essays examining Sargent's life and development as an artist.

The complementary exhibition of 60 Sargent drawings from the permanent collection of Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art is on view there through May 9. This is a remarkable showcase for Sargent's precocious and continually exemplary gifts as a draftsman.

This future international superstar emerged from the somewhat financially reduced branch of a prosperous New England mercantile family. By the time he was born in Florence, Italy in 1856, Sargent's moody father had abandoned his medical practice in Philadelphia and, at the urging of his strong-willed, wealthy wife, had taken up a peripatetic existence in Europe. His mother was an accomplished musician and amateur artist.

Raised in the cultured, overseas milieu favored by Henry James in his novels, young Sargent led a nomadic life as he traveled with his parents around the Continent. While he received little formal education, his experiences contributed to his cosmopolitan polish as an observer of people and places.

Sargent's father envisioned a naval career for his son, but encouraged by his mother, he took up art, studying briefly in Italy and sketching from nature as he moved around Europe.

In 1874, the tall and reserved but vigorous and ambitious teenager settled in Paris, where he trained in painting with the fashionable academic portraitist, Charles-Emile-Auguste Duran, who called himself Carolus-Duran. Sargent learned to paint directly on canvas, seeking to capture the essential features of subjects through spontaneous brushwork, a subdued palette and vivid contrasts between light and dark. Carolus-Duran's enthusiasm for the work of Spanish master Diego Velazquez informed the art of the younger man throughout his career. Sargent's assured, informal portrait of Carolus-Duran (1879), painted when he was 23, reflected both his maturity as an artist and his break from the conventional style of his French master.

While laboring to hone his skills, Sargent cast a canny eye on the art world around him, particularly the annual Paris Salon, where up-and-coming artists could establish their reputations. Deciding that his best chance as a newcomer was via a genre work, in the summer of 1877 the young American made a series of sketches of fisherfolk on the Brittany coast. The resulting "Oyster Gatherers of Cancale" (1878), a bright, freely-brushed canvas, showed a group of women and children carrying baskets across a beach. The sizable painting won high praise at the Salon of 1878. It is now a treasured holding of the Corcoran Gallery. The next year, in the luminous, subtly-hued "In the Luxembourg Gardens" (1879), Sargent gave a Whistlerian touch to an oft-depicted site that was at the center of Parisian social life.

Before long, flush with his initial successes and urged on by Carolus-Duran, Sargent traveled to Spain to study the work of Velazquez at first hand. Out of this intense exposure to Spanish art and culture came the large and spectacular "The Spanish Dance" (1879), a celebration of couples doing the tango under a sparkling nocturnal sky, and one of his greatest masterpieces, "El Jaleo."

As the artist hoped, "El Jaleo" caused a stir at the 1882 Salon, and continues to this day to stimulate effusive admiration. It occupies a special niche at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; Mrs Gardner, whom Sargent depicted in two memorable likenesses, was a fervent supporter and patron of the painter.

Inspired by a two-month sojourn in Morocco in 1880, Sargent painted "Fumee d'ambre gris." A haunting portrayal of a mysterious North African woman perfuming herself with ambergris, this strikingly modern composition was displayed at the 1880 Salon.

Back in Paris in the early 1880s, Sargent decided it was time to try portraiture as his next vehicle for getting ahead. Over the next several years he executed a number of widely exhibited likenesses of Parisian residents that are among the finest of his career.

Sargent's first life-sized, full-length male portrait, "Dr Pozzi at Home" (1881) was of a Parisian doctor said to include among his lovers actress Sarah Bernhardt and socialite Madame Pierre Gautreau. In keeping with his subject's flamboyant reputation, the painter had Pozzi strike a self-assured pose and abandoned his muted palette in favor of rendering a startlingly red dressing gown against a crimson carpet and drape.

During several lengthy stays in Venice around this time, Sargent painted a group of rather unusual genre pictures focusing on working class women and sinister, cloaked men in darkened alleys and cool, expansive interiors. They appear to be experiments in Frans Hals-like color harmonies and Velazquez-inspired spatial strategies.

In the most sexually charged of these works, "The Sulphur Match" (1882), a young girl tips back in her chair while looking flirtatiously at her male companion lighting a cigarette. This dramatically-lit cafe scene is reminiscent of Sargent's earlier epic, "El Jaleo."

Sargent's interest in the work of Hals and Velazquez reverberates in the magnificent "The Daughters of Edward D. Boit" (1882), a compelling and complex modern group portrait that also bears the influences of Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet.

The subjects, children of rich New Englanders who traveled regularly in Europe, ranged in age from four to 14 and were shown in their cavernous Paris apartment. This work marks the emergence of psychological nuance in Sargent's work, and remains a grand and interesting image.

The expatriate American's ascension to the top of the French art world came to an abrupt end with the unveiling of his notorious homage to Madame Gautreau, the Louisiana-born wife of a Paris banker. A beauty famed for her stunning looks, unorthodox clothes and ostentatious presence at social gatherings, she was avidly sought by Sargent as a portrait subject. He saw in her a fresh opportunity to make a splash at the Salon.

After much effort, the eager painter and his rather indolent sitter evolved a likeness, slyly entitled "Madame X" (1884), in which she assumed a haughty profile pose, with one strap of her black, decollete gown brazenly slipped off her shoulder. This daring realism, combined with the sensuality of the likeness, prompted even blase Parisians to conclude that the upstart American artist had gone too far.

The ensuing uproar stunned Sargent, who sought to make amends after the Salon closed by repainting the strap in an acceptable vertical position, but the damage had been done. His bold effort to challenge the conventions of portraiture had backfired, compromising his carefully nurtured prospects for continuing artistic and financial success in France.

Unwilling to buck the tide of hostility, Sargent decided to leave Paris and, after considering Boston and New York, settled permanently in London. He had just turned 30 when he established himself in Whistler's old studio on Tite Street. It was to be the scene of his greatest triumphs, but at first the expatriate American was regarded with suspicion by the British, his works dismissed as too French and too modern in that stronghold of the tradition-bound Royal Academy.

His distinguished fellow expatriate, Henry James, already well established in English society, helped break the ice for Sargent. The esteemed writer admired the young artist's work and liked him personally. Describing Sargent as "civilised to his fingertips," James energetically introduced him to his wide circle of acquaintances in the arts, the intelligentsia and politics.

In a perceptive essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1887, James made the acute observation that at the end of Sargent's first decade of work he offered the "slightly `uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn."

Building on this flattering advocacy, Sargent worked prodigiously, and soon flourished. In the closing years of the 1880s, he traveled around England, creating plein-air landscapes, figure studies, river scenes and still lifes. Among the most beautiful works of this period is the colorful "Poppies" (1886), recalling an effulgent flower bed in the British countryside.

During this time he painted "Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose" (1885-86), the breakthrough canvas that was a resounding success at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1887 and won over skeptical Britons. Like "El Jaleo," his great Salon extravaganza of five years before, Sargent never painted anything like this again.

"Carnation" shows two pretty girls in white smocks standing in a darkening garden and lighting Oriental paper lanterns that mirror the surrounding, glowing flowers. The bright colors, decorative touches and poetic treatment of light and mood beguiled English observers at the 1887 show.

Somewhat before this triumph, Sargent had experimented with various Impressionist techniques, inspired by mid-1880s visits to French titan Claude Monet at Giverny. He paid tribute to his friend and the craft of plein-air painting in "Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood" (1885).

After the success of "Carnation" Sargent was regarded as the preeminent Impressionist in Great Britain. While many of his canvases suggest his interest in the play of natural light and employ a high-keyed palette and broken brush work, he always retained the human figure as the central focus of his visual attention, as in "Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife" (1889). Helleu and his young bride visited Sargent in the countryside and posed for this precisely delineated picture beside the River Avon.

Sargent's initial successes as a portrait painter came not in England, but in the United States, during sojourns in the late 1880s in New York and Boston. Welcomed and lionized, especially in Boston, he was soon flooded with commissions to paint likenesses of wealthy, well-connected sitters.

Before long he became the portraitist of choice in both Gilded Age America and Edwardian England. His grand manner style; soft, buttery brushwork; insights into personality and virtuosity in recording the sheen of dresses and drapery proved irresistible to the beautiful people of his era.

The combination of his flattering likenesses, international viewpoint and brilliant style were in stark contrast to the prosaic academic manner of his counterparts, particularly in Britain, and brought him all the patrons he could handle. Criss-crossing the Atlantic for decades, Sargent carried out the almost endless stream of portrait commissions that came his way.

In his first group portrait of adults and one of his first important English commissions was "The Misses Vickers" (1884), showing the three daughters of the famous armament manufacturer in an innovative composition. Highlighting the three young women against the dark interior of a room, Sargent conveyed a sense of nervous tension among the sisters that belied their air of repose and elegant setting.

He achieved notable early successes in England with several portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson, the frail, intense Scottish author. Somewhat offbeat in composition, as befits their subject, the Stevenson likenesses are triumphs of informality and insight.

In 1898 Sargent painted portraits of powerful Bond Street dealer Asher Wertheimer and his wife. The former likeness is an extraordinarily perceptive picture, capturing the good humor and relaxed presence of the affluent sitter, while the poodle with lolling tongue at the lower left serves as a foil to his master.

Wertheimer became a good friend and Sargent's greatest patron, commissioning additional portraits of his wife and children. "Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer" (1901) is a particularly vital rendering of two alluring young women, dressed to the nines, surrounded by the trappings of wealth in the luxurious interior of their father's London drawing room.

By the turn of the century Sargent was approached by members of the aristocracy, whose forebears had been immortalized by a who's who of British painters, asking for portraits to hang next to those likenesses in some of England's grandest country houses. As a result, he executed images of Edwardian nobility that have come to define that epoch, indeed, too much so in the view of some critics. Generally, however, these likenesses are appreciated as invaluable mirrors of Edwardian society and all it meant for England,

In 1906 Sargent completed a self portrait for the Uffizi gallery, which represented an affirmation of his high international standing. He presented himself as a bearded, steady-eyed gentleman with a proper high collar and somber suit and no sign of his profession. As befits the artist's painfully shy personality, his self-portrait is the least revealing of all the likenesses he painted. In Florence, it joined a celebrated collection of self-portraits by such titans of world art as David, Ingres, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian and Velazquez.

One of the few portraits completed by Sargent after 1910 was a compelling likeness of his long-time friend and champion, James, which captures the nervous watchfulness of the celebrated, rotund writer. Instigated by James's friends to mark his 70th birthday in 1913, this labor of love gave the painter an opportunity to honor an old compatriot who had tirelessly promoted his career.

The last great Sargent portrait, created after repeated requests by the sitter, was "John D. Rockefeller" (1917). Painted at Kykuit, the Rockefeller house in Tarrytown, N.Y., it depicts the aging oil millionaire and philanthropist as a frail, ascetic, almost saintly figure looking heavenward. It suggests Sargent's appreciation for the many philanthropic good deeds of this famed business titan.

One of the special treats of the exhibition is a rare Sargent conversation piece, "An Interior in Venice" (1898), painted as a gift to its subjects, Mr and Mrs Daniel Curtis of Boston and their son, painter Ralph Curtis and his wife. Set in the Curtis's expansive quarters in the elegant Seventeenth Century Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, where Sargent stayed when in the city, it features beams of sunlight dramatically highlighting each figure in the dim space. Rejected by Mrs Curtis because she felt it made her look too old and because her son's informal pose offended her sense of decorum, Sargent presented it to the Royal Academy in London as his diploma work in 1899.

In the last quarter century of his life, weary of catering to the whims of sitters, Sargent largely abandoned portraiture to concentrate on oil and watercolor landscape, Alpine figure studies, architectural pictures of gardens and parks and fountains and statues, and genre scenes and mural work. Much of his time after 1900 was devoted to extended painting forays to diverse locales in France, Italy and Switzerland, often accompanied by the family of his sister, Violet Ormond, and other friends, who frequently acted as models. In an exquisite, highly expressive oil, "Group with Parasols (A Siesta)" (1905), he depicted several male and female friends jumbled together in a dreamy, shared siesta.

Sargent featured two favorite traveling companions, British painter Wilfred de Glehn and his American-born artist-wife, Jane Emmet, in the setting of one of his beloved haunts, in the magnificent "The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy" (1907).

The de Glehns also appear in another fine oil, "Villa Torre Galli: The Loggia" (1910), in which Jane reads in the foreground as Wilfred paints at an easel in the background of the villa where the Sargent party stopped on the outskirts of Florence.

Sargent returned often to Venice, where he reveled in depicting canals, campos and palace facades from different angles and under varying light conditions, in both oils and watercolors. Some of his finest watercolors were executed during these sojourns, notable for their spontaneity, freedom, luminosity and limpid style. Among the best, both painted from the vantage point of a gondola, are "Scuola di San Rocco" (circa 1903) and "On the Grand Canal" (circa 1907).

Similar scenes, painted in oil, such as "The Rialto, Venice" (circa 1911) and "Corner of the Church of San Stae, Venice" (circa 1913) demonstrate Sargent's versatility in portraying his favorite Italian city in different media.

Sargent made Boston his unofficial American base, sojourning there often and establishing an important circle of friends, sitters and patrons. Around 1890 he was commissioned by the trustees of the Boston Public Library. The exhibition in Boston will include a number of his sketches and preliminary work for this project, to which he devoted an enormous amount of time. The first murals were installed in 1895 and the last in 1916.

Sargent later undertook to decorate the new building of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and created murals honoring World War I dead in Harvard University's Widener Library. Thus, Boston has three major mural cycles, all worth seeing.

In 1918 the British Government asked Sargent to go to the front in France and record his impressions of the war, especially images of American and British cooperation. At age 62, the temporary war artist was said to have astonished the troops with his courage and endurance.

Numerous sketches in the Corcoran exhibition of soldiers, motorcycles, trucks, cannon trailers, horses and devastated terrain document the quick, meticulous studies Sargent executed on this assignment.

His monumental oil "Gassed" (1919), on loan from London's Imperial War Museum, constitutes a moving commentary on the ravages wreaked by poison gas on British soldiers, which he witnessed first hand in August 1918.

In a highly evocative watercolor, "Crashed Aeroplane" (1918), Sargent depicted farmers engaged in the timeless ritual of gathering hay, seemingly oblivious to the disaster of the downed plane in the field behind them. This is one of a series of wartime watercolors he presented to the Imperial War Museum.

Reflecting the esteem in which he was held on both sides of the Atlantic, Sargent received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, as well as Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania. He was showered with medals, prizes and other honors.

Sargent died of a heart attack in London in 1925. He was 69. A private funeral and burial in Surrey was followed by an imposing memorial service in Westminster Abbey. Memorial exhibitions were held in London, New York and Boston soon thereafter.

Combining keen observation of the world around him with technical brilliance and entrepreneurial savvy, this premiere Anglophile made himself one of the leading painters of his era. His portraits offer a substantial visual record of important American and British personalities of his day, while his landscapes and superb watercolors display his knack for capturing the spirit of place with verve and apparent spontaneity.

This knockout exhibition - underscoring the breadth, quality and depth of Sargent's oeuvre - should not be missed. Showcasing works that are not likely to be seen again in this country for years, it dispels any doubts about the lasting importance of this artist's work. Ensconced in the hearts of Americans and Englishmen alike, John Singer Sargent's place among the world's finest artists should hereafter be secure.

The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW in Washington; telephone 202/737-4215.