Sargent and Paris
Metropolitan Museum of Art, April 27– August 3, 2025
Musée d’Orsay, Paris: Sept. 22, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Reviewed by Ed Voves
Original Photography by Anne Lloyd
It is no exaggeration to say that reputation of John Singer Sargent is riding the crest of a spectacular wave of scholarly appreciation and popular appeal. In just over three years, Sargent's artistic career has been the subject of three "once in a lifetime" exhibitions.
Beginning in the autumn of 2022 and extending into the spring of 2023, Sargent and Spain appeared at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum. Fashioned by Sargent followed at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, October 2023 to January 2024, afterward travelling to Tate Britain. Now, The Met is making its own statement on the genius of the great American master, Sargent and Paris.
This year marks the 100 year anniversary of the passing of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). This may explain in part the rationale for three major exhibitions on Sargent in rapid succession. But only in part. Sargent's gifts as an artist and his capacity for work are impossible to confine to a single exhibition, even of "once-in-a-lifetime" dimensions.
To a certain extent, the latest Sargent exhibit is a reprieve of The Met's landmark 2015 Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends.That is no cause for complaint.The 2015 Sargent exhibit ranks high among the greatest exhibitions reviewed in Art Eyewitness.
Gallery view of Sargent and Paris at the Metropolitan Museum
© The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
Sargent and Paris certainly deserves a hearty round of accolades, as well.
Sargent and Paris is highlighted by The Met's beloved Madame X, with other major paintings on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and European institutions. Examples from the full range of Sargent's early oeuvre are on view: student copies, landscapes, sketches, genre scenes and much more. A number of these works, to the best of my knowledge, have never been displayed before in an American exhibition.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of Sargent and Paris. The Portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Mrs. Henry White), 1883, appears in the background.
The focus of The Met's exhibition is the opening decade of Sargent's storied career. Beginning in 1874, when the 18-year Sargent joined the atelier of Carolus-Duran, the exhibit charts his brilliant progress in Belle Époque Paris. After a few short years, Sargent achieved the succès de scandale of Madame X (1883-84).
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of Sargent and Paris, showing
Study of Mme Gautreau (Unfinished Replica of "Madame X"), 1884
Critical acclaim for Sargent, however, dimmed in the decades following his death.
For much of the twentieth century, Sargent was viewed as too much of an "Old Master" to fit into the narrative of modern art. It's not difficult to see why. Accomplished in every genre and technique associated with painting and drawing, Sargent made no concessions to the spate of "isms" which took hold of art beginning in the late 1880's.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Self-Portrait, 1886
Yet, there is a deep irony to Sargent's place in art history. His commanding position in portraiture was rooted in more than a prodigy-like mastery of the canons of art. The young Sargent relentlessly sharpened his skill and insight with pencil drawings, oil sketches and water color, exploring unusual vantage points in the world about him and probing the unadorned human countenance, stripped of pretense.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Spanish Roma Woman, 1876-1882
Sargent's teacher, Carolus-Duran, had much to offer his talented pupil. The Met exhibition has one of Carolus-Duran's portraits on display, dating to 1869, five years before Sargent began working under his tutelage. There can be little doubt that La Dame au Gant (Madame Carolus-Duran) was a major influence on Sargent's bravura portraits of Anglo-American grandees during the 1890's and early twentieth century.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
Carolus-Duran’s La Dame au Gant (Madame Carolus-Duran), 1869
Carolus-Duran was a major proponent of exactitude in details of the couture of his subjects, as well as their face and form. Initially, Sargent followed suit, not entirely to his advantage.
Sargent's first major portrait was of his friend, Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts. An American living in Europe like Sargent, Fanny Watts shifts in her seat, glaring at us with one gleaming eye, the other lost in shadow.
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John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts,1877
Miss Fanny is posed awkwardly, her discomfiture so evident that she appears ready to rise from her seat and join the viewer on the other side of the picture plane.
Three years later, Sargent painted another a seated lady. This time, his composition and technique could not be faulted. Sargent was no longer an apprentice or journeyman painter. He had become the artist we instantly recognize - Sargent the portrait master.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, 1880
Madame Ramón Subercaseaux was the wife of a wealthy South American who had taken up residence in Paris. Sargent presents the musically-gifted woman as totally relaxed, at ease with herself and so confident that her piano recital will merit our approval that her expression almost dares us not to applaud.
Even though the setting is much more elaborate than that of his portrait of Fanny Watts, we really don't notice. Many of the details of the room are only sketched in, like the pattern of the rugs. The vase of flowers at the top of the painting is cropped in the style of Japanese prints.
With his portrait of Madame Subercaseaux, Sargent served notice that he would not devote himself to meticulous detail. Instead, Sargent evoked the character of his sitters with his artful handling of their body "language." The elegant hand of Madam Subercaseaux, delicately resting on the keyboard, is a fine illustration of his growing skill.
How had this transformation occurred? Had the young Sargent "doubled-down", painting portraits to the exclusion of all else. He certainly painted many a brilliant portrait during the decade of 1874-1885, quite a few unconventional ones, too
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madam Allouard-Jouan, ca. 1882
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron (detail),1881
The secret of Sargent's rite of passage can be found in his ventures beyond the doors of the Carolus-Doran atelier. The impressive strides which we see in Madam Subercaseaux's portrait reflect Sargent's ability to create authentic settings in which to place his subjects that were not limited to domestic interiors.
Sargent was never professionally associated with the Impressionists and seldom painted en plein air, except in watercolor. Yet, in 1878, he created a brilliant genre scene, En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish) that would not have been out of place the following year at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878
Perhaps even more important, given Sargent's career trajectory as the greatest society portrait painter of his era, is the 1879 painting, In the Luxembourg Gardens. This idyllic Parisian setting was a favored locale for the elite clientele who would shower Sargent with commissions in coming years. But high society does not take center stage in this painting. In fact, it is difficult at first to comprehend what is the focus of this urban landscape.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879
In the Luxembourg Gardens is an unorthodox painting which defies the conventions of pictorial composition. The stylish couple are walking, arm-in-arm, away from the center of the painting, as if exiting the scene. The glimmering pond, a tour de force of reflected light and shadow, is radically cropped, on the right-hand edge.The painting's vanishing point leads into the distance past a statue of no particular significance.
At first glance, this is a lovely painting which does not quite come together as a coherent whole. Is this really a scene with a yawning gap in its center? Why did Sargent not focus the composition on the superbly handled pond, shimmering in the light of the setting sun?
And then, after a moment or two of reflection, the sheer brilliance of Sargent's handling of pictorial space suddenly seizes hold of our attention. He has made us, the viewers, the subject of the painting. As the young couple ambles away toward the left, we take our place in the center of the composition. All the details of the scene, pond, visitors, statues, setting sun are as we see them.
With In the Luxembourg Gardens, Sargent proved that he could create a visual universe where every aspect came together in a harmonious whole. Three years later, he displayed the same level of genius, this time in an interior setting, with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
Gallery View of Sargent and Paris, showing John Singer Sargent’s
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
Four young girls, ranging in ages from toddler to adolescent, are posed in a modern rendition of Velazquez's celebrated Las Meninas. In 1879, Sargent had traveled to the Prado to study this greatest of Spanish paintings. One of his oil sketches of Las Meninas is on display in The Met exhibition.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2022)
John Singer Sargent’s copy of Velazquez’ Las Meninas, 1879
When the Boit family, American ex-pats living in Paris, commissioned him to paint a portrait of their daughters, Sargent convinced them to let him pose the girls in a reprise of Velazquez.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Like Las Meninas, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is a painting of interior spaces, physical and emotional. Once again, we the viewers are brought into the visual dynamics of the picture, though not quite as thoroughly as In the Luxembourg Gardens.
Three of the Boit girls look directly out of the picture at their parents - and at us. One turns away. There are always hidden sanctuaries of thought and feeling which remain elusive, just beyond the grasp of knowing by others - or even of self-knowledge.
Surely, Sargent intended to address the inner-complexities of life with this audacious work of art. The Daughters is a true modern icon, as La Meninas had been in the seventeenth century.
As noted, one of the Boit sisters, Florence (the eldest) shows only the side of her face. It is interesting to reflect that while a person's profile prevents other people from looking directly at them, it is also a view of themselves they never see.
By the time he completed The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Sargent had proven beyond dispute that he could a create entire realms of human action, the world around us and the spiritual space within. But could he handle the ultimate challenge for a portrait painter, to take a human face, especially in-profile, and invest it with the spark of personality, making it recognizable to all, while still retaining an air of enigmatic mystery?
With Madam X, Sargent aimed to prove that no challenge in portrait painting was too great for him to handle.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (detail), 1883–84
Sargent had an additional, ulterior motive in painting this sensational portrait. He wanted to drive home a telling point.
Critics in Paris were becoming anxious about the growing number and prestige of foreign artists. One French writer focused his ire on the Americans in Paris who "have painters, like Mr. Sargent, who take away our medals, and pretty women who eclipse ours."
When Sargent won a medal at the 1880 Salon for Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, controversy ensued. Madame Subercaseuaux was a native of Chile, not a French woman! And the artist was an "upstart" American!
The honor of France was satisfied by reassigning Sargent's medal to another of his paintings, the double portrait of two French children, shown above. Sargent, however, determined to make his mark on his own terms.
Searching for an ally, Sargent enlisted the help of one of the celebrated beauties of Parisian society. Virginie Amélie Avegno
Gautreau was actually a fellow-American. Born in 1859 in Louisiana to a French-Creole father and a French mother, her mother brought Virginia to live in France when her father died.
Art Eyewitness Image (2025)
Contrasting views of Virginie Gautreau, ca. 1878,
and John Singer Sargent's Madam X
If Virginie Gautreau was one of the American "pretty women who eclipse ours" in the words of the French critic, it is difficult to prove that by her actual photo. However, Sargent was intrigued by her "strange, weird, fantastic, curious
beauty." He was determined to paint a full-scale portrait of her - and take the French art world by storm.
Virginie Gautreau, as socially ambitious as Sargent was artistically, was only too willing to comply.
Sargent pulled-out all the stops to gain the full measure of his subject - and co-conspirator. He incessantly sketched the charismatic, vivacious Gautreau from every angle and in every mood. Sargent adapted his drawing technique to suit his purpose, varying from spare, refined line in one sketch to a fluid, almost painterly stroke in another.
Anne Lloyd, Photos (2025)
Drawings by John Singer Sargent, ca. 1883-84
Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, Study for “Madam X” (top);
Whispers (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau and a Friend)
The resulting archive of drawings is one of the most astonishing documentaries of a single human being in art history. These drawings are one of the highlights of Sargent and Paris. Visitors to the exhibition, surrounded by major oil paintings, should definitely devote considerable attention to these magnificent works on paper.
There is also a second, unfinished version of Madame X on view. Once thought to be a preliminary effort, it now appears that it was a replica of the original. Anticipating a huge success for his portrait of Virginie Gautreau, Sargent prepared an additional copy to keep up with popular demand after the original was unveiled at the 1884 Salon.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
Gallery view of Sargent and Paris, at The Met,
showing John Singer Sargent’s Madame X
Instead, the public display of the portrait of Virginie Gautreau, initially entitled Portrait de Mme ***, raised a public outcry. The denunciations, ranging from bad taste to moral degeneracy, are part of the legend of Sargent's career and need not be repeated at any great length in this review.
What needs to be stated is that John Singer Sargent lost the battle of Madame X and won the war. Talent, achievement, beauty are not the exclusive property of one nation or society. They are the gifts of artistic genius, crafted by those who devote themselves to their creation and share the result with all.
After the shock of the rejection of Madame X, Sargent moved to England and established his studio in the Chelsea section of London. There he kept Madame X on view to show prospective clients. Madame X worked her magic, helping Sargent become a very wealthy man.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025)
John Singer Sargent in His Studio with the Painting of Madame X.
Original photo by Adolphe Giraudon, ca.1884
In 1916, Sargent sold Madame X to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There she resides to this day, secure in a place reserved for an exclusive company of people and paintings:
Immortality.
***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights
reserved
Original photography, copyright of Anne
Lloyd
Introductory image: Anne Lloyd,
Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (detail) Full citation of Madame X appears below.
Gallery view of the Sargent and Paris exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery view of the Sargent and Paris exhibition. The Portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Mrs. Henry White), 1883, appears in the background.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery view of Sargent and Paris, showing Study of Mme Gautreau (Unfinished Replica of
"Madame X"), ca. 1884. Oil on canvas:81 1/4 × 42 1/2 in. (206.4
× 107.9 cm) Tate Britain, London.(N04102)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Self-Portrait, 1886. Oil on canvas: 13 9/16 × 11 11/16 in. (34.5 × 29.7 cm) Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums (ABDAG003876)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Spanish Roma Woman, ca. 1876-1882. Oil on canvas: 29 x 23 5/8 in. (73.7 x 60 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (10.64.10)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Carolus-Duran’s La Dame au Gant (Madame Carolus-Duran), painted in 1869.
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, 1877. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Oil on canvas: 41 11/16 in. × 32 in. (105.9 × 81.3 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, (1962-193-1)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Madame Ramón Subercaseaux, 1880. Oil on canvas: 65 in. × 43 1/4 in. (165.1 × 109.9 cm) Sarofim Foundation
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madam Allouard-Jouan, ca. 1882. Oil on canvas: 29 5/16 × 22 1/4 in. (74.5 × 56.5 cm) Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (PPP03044)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878. Oil on canvas: 31 in. × 48 3/8 in. (78.7 × 122.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection. 2014.79.32
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s In the Luxembourg Gardens, 1879. Oil on canvas: 25 7/8 × 36 3/8 in. (65.7 × 92.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery View showing John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Oil on canvas: 87 3/8 × 87 5/8 in. (221.9 × 222.6 cm) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s copy of Velazquez’ Las Meninas, 1879. Oil on canvas: 44 3/4 × 39 1/2 in. (113.7 × 100.3 cm) Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, 2019.21.1
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (detail), 1883–84. Oil on canvas: 82 1/8 × 43 1/4 in. (208.6 × 109.9 cm); Framed: 95 3/4 × 56 5/8 × 5 in. (243.2 × 143.8 × 12.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (16.53)
Art Eyewitness Image (2025). Contrasting views of Virginia Gautreau (Photo from the Collection of the Bibliothèque de la Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris, ca.1878) and a detail of Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Drawing by John Singer Sargent: Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, Study for “Madam X”, 1883-84. Graphite on paper: 9 11/16 × 13 7/16 in. (24.6 × 34.2 cm) The British Museum (1936,1116.3)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Drawing by John Singer Sargent: Whispers (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau and a Friend), ca. 1883–84 Charcoal and graphite on off-white laid paper: 13 9/16 x 9 11/16 in. (34.4 x 24.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (50.130.117)
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) Gallery view of Sargent and Paris, showing John Singer Sargent’s Madame X.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) John Singer Sargent in His Studio with the Painting of Madame X. Original photo by Adolphe Giraudon, ca.1884. Albumen silver print: 7 7/8 × 10 3/8 in. (20 × 26.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (2022.387)
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