Sargent's "Fumée d'Ambre Gris” ("Smoke of Ambergris”) (1880). Clark Art Institute
New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s "Sargent and Paris” exhibition builds to a single moment, a single painting and a single scandal in the life of the young American artist. In 1884, a decade after he had arrived in Paris as a precocious 18-year-old, John Singer Sargent unveiled a portrait of a Louisiana-born Creole woman named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau at the Paris salon. It caused a sensation that still ripples today.
Known at the time as "Madame X,” the full-length image showed a woman in a low-cut black dress, with the jeweled right shoulder strap sliding down her preternaturally white arms.
Sargent's "Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (Portraits de M.E.P. … et de Mlle L. P.)” (1880). Rich Sanders/Des Moines Art Center
She is seen in profile, but enough of her face is visible to suggest she is fully aware of her beauty and its beguiling impact on the viewer. You could put this face in the dictionary next to the word "hauteur.”
Contemporary reaction was mixed. Some recognized this as Sargent’s finest work to date in a meteoric career that entwined the affable and polished young artist with the highest social circles. In a see-and-be-seen world, she was the sinecure of desire and envy, inviting - and worse, rebuffing - the male gaze.
Sargent had been at work on this portrait since 1882, when he approached Gautreau with a typically canny offer to paint her portrait.
For the previous few years, he had been receiving and executing ever more prestigious commissions, producing work that was strategically pitched between avant-garde and traditional sensibilities.
He flattered his subjects, appealed to their vanity and enabled the projection of their carefully manicured (and coiffed and dressed) sense of self. He also knew how to press buttons when it came to taste and propriety.
Gautreau was a known beauty, wealthy, regal and acutely aware of how much of her social position depended on exotic good looks and a daring sense of style.
And as an American-born woman whose wealth came in part from her family’s participation in the antebellum slave economy, she was an outsider on the inside of French society.
Sargent wasn’t proposing just a portrait but a collaboration, in which both artists - one a painter, the other a performer on the social stage - would work together to advance each other’s interests.
The heated public reaction was, at first, devastating for Gautreau and chastening for Sargent, who repainted the work to return the errant dress strap to a more decorous position.
Structuring the exhibition as an elaborate preamble to Gautreau’s portrait, owned by the Met, only underscores the painting’s studied reticence about its subject.
It is an arresting image, but one that embodies the best and worst of Sargent’s art. Everything you see is masterful, but you have no sense of who this woman is. Her social mask is impenetrable.
Visitors to an exhibition that charts a decade of a young artist’s progress watch as Sargent - whose primary weakness was his own virtuosity - paints his way to a perfection that is as chilly as the snow-white, powdered skin of his most infamous subject.
Sargent's "An Out-of-Doors Study (Paul Helleu Sketching With His Wife)” (1889). MUST CREDIT: Brooklyn Museum of Art
In the several rooms before you encounter Gautreau’s portrait are paintings that make a far stronger case for Sargent as a psychologist, an observer, an innovator.
After an itinerant and privileged childhood, Sargent was brought by his parents to Paris, where he had access to professional artistic training. He quickly found a highly respected teacher, known as Carolus-Duran, and was just as quickly recognized as the great talent within his teacher’s studio.
Sargent was good-looking; fluent in English, French, Italian and German; and a gifted musician.
The curators of the exhibition, Stephanie L. Herdrich of the Met and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Paul Perrin of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, emphasize that Sargent was a diligent student and a rigorous worker, but there’s no denying the obvious: He was a golden boy, blessed with all the key ingredients to success.
Among his early social connections and patrons were the Pailleron family, including the poet and dramatist Édouard Pailleron, his wife, and their two children.
John Singer Sargent's "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” (1882). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Sargent made portraits of them all, and the one of the two children is among his most striking works.
They sit on a low sofa or daybed that is covered with what appears to be a rug. The girl, Marie-Louise, sits almost rigidly in a white dress, staring directly at the viewer, while the boy, a few years older, is turned to the side and looks out in a way that suggests delicacy, suspicion and wariness.
Behind them is an abstract sea of reddish paint, as if they are in some kind of existential furnace, being tempered, refined and glazed into something brittle, glossy and perfect.
Sargent never married, and his most nuanced and subtle character studies tend to be of men, including his friends, the artists Albert de Belleroche and Paul Helleu.
A highlight of the buildup to the portrait of Madame X is her infernal twin, Dr. Pozzi, a physician and socialite whom Sargent painted in luxurious leisure, swaddled in a rich red robe with white cuffs and collar, as if he is a cardinal in the church of self-satisfied dissolution.
He doesn’t need the viewer any more than Madame Gautreau, but he isn’t going to forgo enjoying your fascination with the dazzling highlights of his pristine white lace, rich fabric painted with masterful economy.
The earliest works in the exhibition, student drawings, show Sargent’s extraordinary precocity. But very quickly, he is taking chances far beyond the orderly, skilled draftsmanship evident in his juvenilia.
Two scenes of an orchestra rehearsing reveal his fluency with impressionism, capturing motion, and in other works his admiration for Manet is particularly evident.
He painted popular subjects, exotic places and people, including one astonishing study of shadows and temperature, the 1878 "Staircase in Capri,” a white-on-white image of a steeply pitched staircase cutting like a gash through the center of the canvas.
Another early masterpiece is the 1880 "Fumée d’Ambre Gris” ("Smoke of Ambergris”), depicting a woman allowing incense to gather under a brilliantly white shroud she holds over her head. Her dress appears to be held up by, or perhaps ornamented with, two large metal clasps joined by a chain.
One clasp, in the shadow of her shroud, is silvery, while the other, exposed to direct light, is pure white. From a distance, the illusion of one material under two kinds of light is entirely convincing, yet another example of Sargent’s effortless facility with paint that feels occasionally gratuitous.
Works like this were made to appeal to the contemporary French taste for images of faraway places, beautiful women and exoticism. But in his early genre scenes, views of Venice and more intimate, sketchier portraits of friends and acquaintances, Sargent is more exuberant and adventurous than in the portraits for which he is better known and more admired.
The world feels alive to him, untrammeled by the expectations and masks of society. The water in an 1880 portrait of a man in a gondola in Venice is more interesting than almost any detail of the later portraiture.
And so the portrait of Madame Gautreau feels like both the beginning and the end of something, like a shift from spirited conversation to studied rhetoric, or from chamber to orchestral music.
Sargent has learned how far he can push the public, and perhaps the limits of the liberties he can take with the wealthy clients who commissioned him to make their likenesses. Sargent closed his portrait studio in 1907, complaining that it was a burden to jolly his clients while painting.
He had served wealth and privilege, had added greatly to his own wealth and privilege, and wanted to make art on his own terms. Perhaps he knew too well the kind of art he had made during this first decade in Paris, and wanted to rekindle the energy that is evident in almost everything up to but not including his painting of Madame X.
Sargent and Paris is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Aug. 3.
