Modern Age
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
American Aesthetic Movement painter.
John Singer Sargent was the supreme society portraitist of the Anglo-American fin de siècle, an American born in Florence in 1856 and trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran. He learned a rapid, wet-into-wet attack that made a black dress or a child's pinafore look inevitable in a few sittings.
'Madame X' (Virginie Gautreau, 1884) caused a scandal at the Salon — the fallen strap of her dress, later repainted — and Sargent left Paris for London, where he became the painter of choice for the transatlantic rich. 'The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit' (1882) is his most unexpected interior: four girls and two huge Japanese vases in a dim Paris apartment. 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose' (1885–86), two children lighting lanterns in an English garden at dusk, showed that the bravura portraitist could also paint atmosphere and childhood without a paying sitter.
He died in London in 1925, having largely given up commissioned portraits for watercolors and murals. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray's Yale catalogue raisonné is the documentary foundation for the portraits and the scandal.
The words the record keeps using: bravura, worldly, fluent, glamorous, observant, dusk-lit.
At a glance
- Lived 1856–1925
- Origin American
- Worked in London, Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Aesthetic Movement
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Chiaroscuro, Alla prima (wet-in-wet), En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Four Boit daughters occupy a dim Paris apartment with two enormous blue-and-white Japanese vases; the youngest sits with a doll, the older girls recede into a dark doorway. Sargent's strangest and most modern group… - Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1884 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Virginie Gautreau stands in profile in a black satin dress against a brown-violet ground, her skin powdered to a cool lavender, one strap later repainted after the 1884 Salon scandal over the fallen strap and the… - Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885 (Tate Britain, London)
Two girls light paper lanterns in a flower-filled garden at dusk, painted over two autumns at Broadway in the Cotswolds, only in the few minutes of true twilight each evening. The title comes from a popular song; the…
What was said
Ormond and Kilmurray document the Madame X scandal and Sargent's own later regard for the picture as his best, treating the portraits as performances of social presence — stance, dress, and profile — rather than as psychological case studies.
The 1884 Salon presentation of Madame Gautreau — the fallen strap, the powdered profile — was received as an indecorous portrait of a known Parisienne; Sargent repainted the strap and soon shifted his practice to London.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was painted at Broadway only in the brief evening minutes when the lanterns and the dusk matched — an outdoor campaign that used Sargent's alla prima speed for atmosphere rather than for a society likeness.
Lineage
Learned from Giovanni Boldini, Elizabeth Peyton
What would John make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after John Singer Sargent", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with John · Keep a life moment the way John would · Pictures made after John