In the new issue of The Objective Standard, just published today, I look at the life and career of my favorite painter, John Singer Sargent. What makes Sargent unique in art history, I argue, is that he was a painter of secular elegance--an artist whose work adapted cutting-edge Impressionist techniques to capture the experiences of worldly pleasure by the rising class of industrialists in the pre-World War I era.
Excerpt:
Sargent’s portraits of women are notable for the extraordinary confidence, intelligence, and forthrightness of their subjects. Consider Betty Wertheimer (1908), Carmencita (1890), Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1893) or Mrs. Charles Thursby (1898), all painted during a period of vast changes in the social and cultural status of women in Europe and the United States. Writers and journalists—especially Henry James—used the phrase “New Woman” to refer to this new ideal of femininity: women who were educated, articulate, ambitious, intellectually and psychologically independent, and physically active.... Sargent’s most famous New Woman portrait is Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1897), in which Edith Stokes stands with a brilliant and cheerful expression on her face as her husband glowers in the background. She wears a loose, roomy skirt and a comfortable blouse with a tightly cinched waist, an outfit instantly recognizable at the time as signaling a New Woman. Edith was a famous model, having posed for Daniel Chester French’s sculpture The Republic—centerpiece of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—as well as several other portraits, which give us the chance to compare Sargent’s work with those of some contemporaries. In Fernand Paillet’s 1892 version, for example, Edith is placid and ordinary, even indistinct. Ceilia Beaux’s 1898 portrait is better, but its beauty is carefully staged and still. Sargent draws attention to Edith’s easy confidence, whereas Beaux portrays her with self-conscious formality, in a painting that lacks the vivacious pose, the modern costume, and the candid light of Sargent’s version.
Ten years later, Sargent painted the accomplished violinist Lady Leonora Speyer. An intimate of composers Edward Elgar and Richard Strauss (Strauss dedicated his opera Salome to her), Speyer later taught at Columbia University and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1927. Sargent depicts her with a combination of grace and confidence that does justice to her artistry as well as her femininity. It is astonishing to reflect that this was completed the same year as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—a misogynistic depiction of a brothel that almost literally tears the female form apart and displays the severed pieces. It is ironic that, today, Picasso is regarded as the more “modern” artist, when the reality is that between these two, his work is both more technically primitive and more aesthetically and philosophically reactionary. Picasso’s work repudiates what Sargent’s celebrates: individualism, personality, and modern womanhood.
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