Word: sargent
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...1870s Sargent was shaping up for a glittering Parisian career. It was not to last. The curators of the National Gallery show, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, have wittily duplicated the hanging of two portraits that, seen at the Paris Salon of 1884, caused a ruckus that precipitated Sargent's departure from France to England. One is his image of a pushy American social locomotive, Virginie Gautreau, all twisting, mannered pose and lunar, greenish-white skin, identified only as Madame X. The French critics and public hated it--and her. The other is a painting of a fashionable gynecologist named...
England made his fortune. He was what the English upper classes--both hereditary aristocrats and nouveau riche --had wanted but not found: a portraitist who could perform in the Grand Manner. There had been none since the death of Thomas Gainsborough a century before, and Sargent, with his tremendous fluency and genuine empathy for the social levels of his sitters, filled the gap to perfection. He had no interest in politics past or present, was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony. As a biographer who knew him pointed out, "He would have been puzzled...
...instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured, in its way, as any brushstroke by de Kooning. With women Sargent was in his element, and icons of late-Victorian and Edwardian femininity rise from his work with wonderful directness: those all-time-champion Jewish princesses the Wertheimer sisters, zaftig...
...anyone knows, Sargent never had--or was even rumored to have had--a sexual relationship in his whole life; nor did he ever do a painting of a nude. His sensuality was wholly visual and confined to the surface of things--the confused glitter of light on a Venetian canal, the rumplings of fabric, the porcelain skin of an upper-class face. The sexiest picture in this show is Two Girls in White Dresses, circa 1909-11. (It is actually one girl, his niece, painted twice, lying on an Alpine hillside.) Except for the faces, not an inch of skin...
Nevertheless, the incessant production of highly paid portraiture began to chafe on Sargent. Clients kept interfering, pestering him to take this out and paint that in. "It seems there is a little something wrong with the mouth!" he complained to one of his sitters, about the demands of another. "A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!" In 1907, at the age of only 51, Sargent decided to give up doing "paughtraits," as he disparagingly called them--except for those commissions he couldn't refuse, like a 1917 portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent wanted...