Portraits
In the early 1880s, Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly full-length portrayals of women, such as Madame Edouard Pailleron (1880) (done en plein-air) and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux (1881). He continued to receive positive critical notice.
Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent's great influences. The Spanish master's spell is apparent in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, a haunting interior that echoes Velázquez's Las Meninas. As in many of his early portraits, Sargent confidently tries different approaches with each new challenge, here employing both unusual composition and lighting to striking effect. One of his most widely exhibited and best loved works of the 1880s was Lady with the Rose (1882), a portrait of Charlotte Burckhardt, a close friend and possible romantic attachment.
His most controversial work, Portrait of Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (1884) is now considered one of his best works and was his favorite; he stated in 1915: "I suppose it is the best thing I have done." When unveiled in Paris at the 1884 Salon, it aroused such a negative reaction that it likely prompted Sargent's move to London. Sargent's self-confidence had led him to attempt a risqué experiment in portraiture—but this time it unexpectedly backfired.
The painting was not commissioned by her, and he pursued her for the opportunity, quite unlike most of his portrait work where clients sought him out. Sargent wrote to a common acquaintance:
I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. ...you might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.
It took well over a year to complete the painting. The first version of the portrait of Madame Gautreau, with the famously plunging neckline, white-powdered skin, and arrogantly cocked head, featured an intentionally suggestive off-the-shoulder dress strap, on her right side only, which made the overall effect more daring and sensual. Sargent repainted the strap to its expected over-the-shoulder position to try to dampen the furor, but the damage had been done. French commissions dried up and he told his friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he contemplated giving up painting for music or business.
Writing of the reaction of visitors, Judith Gautier observed:
Is it a woman? a chimera, the figure of a unicorn rearing as on a heraldic coat of arms or perhaps the work of some oriental decorative artist to whom the human form is forbidden and who, wishing to be reminded of woman, has drawn the delicious arabesque? No, it is none of these things, but rather the precise image of a modern woman scrupulously drawn by a painter who is a master of his art.
Prior to the Madame X scandal of 1884, Sargent had painted exotic beauties such as Rosina Ferrara of Capri and the Spanish expatriate model Carmela Bertagna, but the earlier pictures had not been intended for broad public reception. Sargent kept the painting prominently displayed in his London studio until he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916 after moving to the United States, and a few months after Gautreau's death.
Before arriving in England, Sargent began sending paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy. These included the portraits of Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), a flamboyant essay in red and his first full-length male portrait, and the more traditional Mrs. Henry White (1883). The ensuing portrait commissions encouraged Sargent to complete his move to London in 1886, where he settled in the artistic community of Chelsea.
Notwithstanding the Madame X scandal, he had considered moving to London as early as 1882; he had been urged to do so repeatedly by his new friend, the novelist Henry James. In retrospect his transfer to London may be seen to have been inevitable.
English critics were not warm at first, faulting Sargent for his "clever" "Frenchified" handling of paint. One reviewer seeing his portrait of Mrs. Henry White described his technique as "hard" and "almost metallic" with "no taste in expression, air, or modeling". With help from Mrs. White, however, Sargent soon gained the admiration of English patrons and critics. Henry James also gave the artist "a push to the best of my ability".
Sargent spent much time painting outdoors in the English countryside when not in his studio. On a visit to Monet at Giverny in 1885, Sargent painted one of his most Impressionistic portraits, of Monet at work painting outdoors with his new bride nearby. Sargent is usually not thought of as an Impressionist painter, but he sometimes used impressionistic techniques to great effect. His Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood is rendered in his own version of the Impressionist style. In the 1880s, he attended the Impressionist exhibitions and he began to paint outdoors in the plein-air manner after that visit to Monet. Sargent purchased four Monet works for his personal collection during that time.
Sargent was similarly inspired to do a portrait of his artist friend Paul César Helleu, also painting outdoors with his wife by his side. A photograph very similar to the painting suggests that Sargent occasionally used photography as an aid to composition. Through Helleu, Sargent met and painted the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, a rather somber portrait reminiscent of works by Thomas Eakins. Although the British critics classified Sargent in the Impressionist camp, the French Impressionists thought otherwise. As Monet later stated: "He is not an Impressionist in the sense that we use the word, he is too much under the influence of Carolus-Duran."
Sargent's first major success at the Royal Academy of Arts came in 1887, with the enthusiastic response to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a large piece, painted on site, of two young girls lighting lanterns in an English garden in Broadway in the Cotswolds. The painting was immediately purchased by the Tate Gallery.
His first trip to New York and Boston as a professional artist in 1887-1888 produced over 20 important commissions, including portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famed Boston art patron. His portrait of Mrs. Adrian Iselin, wife of a New York businessman, revealed her character in one of his most insightful works. In Boston, Sargent was honored with his first solo exhibition, which presented 22 of his paintings. Here he became friends with painter Dennis Miller Bunker, who traveled to England in the summer of 1888 to paint with him en plein air, and is the subject of Sargent's 1888 painting Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot.
Back in London, Sargent was quickly busy again. His working methods were by then well-established, following many of the steps employed by other master portrait painters before him. After securing a commission through negotiations which he carried out, Sargent would visit the client's home to see where the painting was to hang. He would often review a client's wardrobe to pick suitable attire. Some portraits were done in the client's home, but more often in his studio, which was well-stocked with furniture and background materials he chose for proper effect. He usually required eight to ten sittings from his clients, although he would try to capture the face in one sitting. He usually kept up pleasant conversation and sometimes he would take a break and play the piano for his sitter. Sargent seldom used pencil or oil sketches, and instead laid down oil paint directly. Finally, he would select an appropriate frame.
The range of pigments regularly used by Sargent were: "Mars yellow (a synthetic iron oxide) and cadmium yellow; viridian and emerald green, sometimes mixed; vermillion and Mars red, both alone and mixed; madder; synthetic ultramarine or cobalt blue; and ivory black, sienna and Mars brown". Sargent had no assistants. He handled all the tasks, such as preparing his canvases, varnishing the painting, arranging for photography, shipping, and documentation. He commanded about $5,000 per portrait, or about $130,000 in current dollars. Some American clients traveled to London at their own expense to have Sargent paint their portrait.
Around 1890, Sargent painted two daring non-commissioned portraits as show pieces—one of actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and one of the popular Spanish dancer La Carmencita. Sargent was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and was made a full member three years later.
In the 1890s, he averaged fourteen portrait commissions per year, none more beautiful than the genteel Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892. His portrait of Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, 1892) was equally well received for its lively depiction of one of London's most notable hostesses. As a portrait painter in the grand manner, Sargent had unmatched success; he portrayed subjects who were at once ennobled and often possessed of nervous energy. Sargent was referred to as "the Van Dyck of our times".
Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits. Sargent exhibited nine of his portraits in the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Sargent painted a series of three portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. The second, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), was one of his best known. He also completed portraits of two U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In 1896, the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Sargent to produce a portrait of Henry Gurdon Marquand. Marquand served as the second president of the museum, and was instrumental in its founding. In 1888, Sargent released his portrait of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Many of his most important works are in museums in the United States. In 1897, a friend sponsored a famous portrait in oil of Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, by Sargent, as a wedding gift. Jean Zimmerman documents the creation of the Stokes portrait in her dual biography of the couple, Love, Fiercely.
In 1898, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in London, commissioned from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron. The Wertheimer portraits reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his subjects. Even though Wertheimer bequeathed most of the paintings to the National Gallery, nowadays they are on display at the Tate Britain.
By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist Max Beerbohm completed one of his seventeen caricatures of Sargent, making well known to the public the artist's paunchy physique. Although only in his forties, Sargent began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His An Interior in Venice (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their elegant palatial home, Palazzo Barbaro, was a resounding success. But, Whistler did not approve of the looseness of Sargent's brushwork, which he summed up as "smudge everywhere". One of Sargent's last major portraits in his bravura style was that of Lord Ribblesdale, in 1902, finely attired in an elegant hunting uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high productivity, which included, in addition to dozens of oil portraits, hundreds of portrait drawings at about $400 each. In 1901, he purchased the next door property to his home in Tite Street, to create a larger studio.
In 1907, at the age of fifty-one, Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved, he stated: "Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.... What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched." In that same year, Sargent painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the celebrated self-portrait collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Sargent made several summer visits to the Swiss Alps with his sisters Emily Sargent, an accomplished painter in her own right, and Violet Sargent (Mrs Ormond) and also Violet's daughters Rose-Marie and Reine, who were the subject of a number of paintings between 1906 and 1913 like The Black Brook (1908) or Nonchaloir (Repose) (1911).
By the time Sargent finished his portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity". Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emerging artistic trends including Cubism and Futurism. Sargent quietly accepted the criticism, but refused to alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted:
Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I like.
Sometime between 1917 and 1920, Sargent painted the portrait of Thomas McKeller, a young African-American elevator operator and WWI veteran. The canvas was kept in the painter's studio until his death and only began to be displayed permanently to the public in 1986 when it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. McKeller also posed as a model for the mythological murals that Sargent painted at the stairway and the rotunda of the MFA Boston and for the World War I memorial murals at Harvard's Widener Library.
In 1925, shortly before he died, Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of aristocrat Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston. The painting was purchased in 1936 by the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it has been on display since then.
