Sargent dazzles Paris again

Paris. John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is one of the most famous painters in the United States, whose elites he extensively portrayed until 1907, the year he declared that he no longer wanted to respond to commissions. However, the exhibition commemorating the centenary of his death, co-organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York (where it has already been presented) and the Musée d’Orsay, focuses almost exclusively on the first ten years of his career, which were spent in Paris from 1874 to 1884. That year, his Portrait of Madame ***also says Madame X (1883-1884) created a scandal during its presentation at the Salon, and Sargent, who had been preparing for some time to settle in London, took it with him to England.

The museums’ choice to only evoke ten years of the artist’s youth was bold, but we know that Madame Xwhich sits at the center of the course in Paris, is “the Mona Lisa” of the Met. The exhibition proved the curators right – Stephanie Herdrich and Alice Pratt Brown for the Met and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Paul Perrin for Orsay – by proving a success (more than 400,000 visitors).

The Parisian masters behind Sargent’s works

The approximately 90 works are presented in an airy manner, allowing the public to view them comfortably. But this constraint means that it was impossible to also exhibit witnesses of the painter’s artistic environment in Paris. Only the cartel of The Lady with the Glove (1869) by Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s Parisian master, recalls which painters this great portraitist passed on to him. Furthermore, James Whistler is mentioned in a cartel, from the start of the exhibition, with In the Luxembourg Gardens (1879). Camille Corot is quoted about In the olive trees, in Capri (1878), Claude Monet and Edgar Degas for Venetian conversation also says Venice Street (around 1880-1882). The impressionist influence is also mentioned in connection with the Portrait of Mrs. Ramon Subercaseaux (around 1880-1881) for the pose of the model and, for the execution, in the commentary of Portraits of children also says The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) which is also close to Velázquez. This is how the absence of Las Meninas, After Velazquez (1879) by Sargent (but other copies after the Spanish are shown) and by Madame Charpentier and her children (1878) by Auguste Renoir which were presented in New York.

The cartels also provide information on Sargent’s artistic milieu, evoking, for example, the relationships introduced to him by his friends Carolus-Duran and Subercaseaux. This theme is developed in a section “Portraits of friends and artists” which clearly places the American in a large Parisian circle where we recognize Auguste Rodin and, further away, Claude Monet. The portraits of Paul Helleu and Albert de Belleroche, as well as Belleroche’s mother, evoke in several places in the exhibition these very close friends of the painter. Strangely, while the Caillebotte exhibition had surprised many French visitors by its insistence on considering, without any beginning of proof, the latter’s homosexuality, here nothing is said about the probability that Sargent was, at least for a time, in love with Belleroche. There is barely any mention in the catalog of the fascination that the young man had on his elder, particularly at the time of the development of Madame X. The biography of the painter, John Singer Sargent. The beautiful world and its reverse side by Emily Eells, Isabelle Gadoin and Charlotte Ribeyrol (Cohen&Cohen, 2025), is more explicit: “At the time when Sargent was working on the full-length portrait of Madame There would therefore be more in Ms. Gautreau’s profile [Madame X] than the simple effect of an overly powdered face… By combining the features of the young man who haunts him and the woman of the world who fascinates him, Sargent insidiously blurs gender identities. Paul Fisher [universitaire et biographe de Sargent] deduces that “if Ms. Gautreau was [alors] the painter’s public obsession, Belleroche was his private obsession.” » These drawings of “crossed lines” and a beautiful oil portrait of Belleroche (1883), then aged 19, are exhibited at the start of the tour.