Dressmaking meets painting in Tate Britain's Sargent and Fashion
Tate Britain's latest exhibition brings Sargent's portraits together with the clothes that inspired them...
February 29, 2024
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
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Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
Sargent and Fashion, in curator Erica Hirshler’s own words, is ‘all about paint and cloth’. Rub shoulders with the great and the good from London’s Edwardian elite to the bobos of ‘Belle Epoque’ Paris and high society from America's ‘Gilded Age’. Sargent's portraits practically sing from the canvas, so vivacious are his sitters as well as their clothes. Today is the era of how will it look on camera - then was the era of ‘will it paint well?’ (as one contemporary French critic put it).
The exhibition begins in black, doing little to anticipate the carnival of colour held in the rooms ahead. On arrival, Lady Sassoon, a lifelong friend of Sargent, greets us in her opera cloak, which is displayed close by. Seeing the physical garments worn by the sitters beside their portraits is an experience unique to this exhibition, in which we find ourselves amidst the wardrobe of the upper echelons of transatlantic ‘Vict-wardian’ society.
In the following room, sitters are painted vivaciously black on black in the style of seventeenth century Dutch painter Frans Hals, so much admired by Sargent. We meet Jane Evans, house mistress at Eton, whose severe stare seems to look right through us. Beside her is Mrs Edward Darley Boit, ‘she not only speaks - she winks’ Henry James once said of her, and this is animatedly caught by Sargent not only in her expression, but in the fall of her cheeky pink polka-dot dress.
Sargent uses clothes to capture his sitters as much as he uses paint. For instance, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, the subject of Sargent’s most scandalous - but self-confessed best - work ‘Madame X’. In this portrait which dominates the second room, her character is immediately obvious, her striking silhouette accentuated against the precursor of Coco Chanel’s little black dress. The portrait is a proud and defiant admission of her lifestyle choices - which was met with contemporary outrage. Her mother pleaded with Sargent to remove the painting when it was exhibited at the Paris Salon. He refused but removed Madame Gautreau’s name (hence Madame X) and repositioned the strap which in the original painting slipped down her right shoulder.
‘Madame X’ was so scandalous that Sargent left Paris, and the portraits in the subsequent room commissioned by British and American patrons are comparatively more conventional. His mastery of light playing with fabric is clear in these paintings of sisters, mothers and their children. But these are not just portraits of people, they are portraits of clothes. The excitement conveyed in the dress of Mrs Hugh Hammersley is tangible; she wears a vibrant cherry silk velvet gown trimmed with gold lace, her collar fizzing in platinum sparks. Sargent was particular about what his sitters wore and demanded they bring multiple dresses - in one sitting he draped a sitter in pink fabric from his studio as her dress did not agree with the colours of the room.
He would alter clothes on canvas and in situ, once claiming“I am in the thick of dressmaking and painting”. For example, in Mrs Inches’s dress, exhibited beside her portrait, there are two bows, however, in the portrait only one appears. Sargent was always thinking about what looked best: he tucked and folded his sitters' garments to create new shapes and textures and meticulously painted the detail of individual patterns. One sitter recalled the painful experience of his arranging their clothes using pins ‘which often pricked’.
Sometimes he pursued people specifically for their clothes, he pursued W. Graham Robertson for his Chesterfield coat, insisting Robertson wear it despite it being mid-summer. The Chesterfield was as much the subject as Robertson himself. When Robertson protested Sargent snapped back ‘The coat is the picture, you must wear it!’. The hot weather forced Robertson to strip off most of his other clothes, emphasising his figure to the delight of Sargent, who draped the coat even more closely about him.
The men of the exhibition are found retired to an earthy room of deep umber walls. A huge portrait of Henry Lee Higginson dominates the space. He was a man’s man, scarred by service as a major in the American Civil War, but on closer inspection, Sargent is playing with fashion and gender identity. The curators have hung the portrait of Higginson next to a portrait of celebrity gynaecologist and Parisian art collector Doctor Pozzi. Pozzi is depicted at home, at the time considered the domain of women, and rather than in a suit, he appears in a sensuous red nightgown, from beneath which the tip of his slipper pokes out: a radical and unusual choice for the 1880s.
Dr Pozzi’s hands are wrapped in the gown, one hand pulling at the cincture, in an extremely tactile way, as if he is exploring his own body. If we look at Sargent’s portraits as a performance between both sitter and artist - the pose becomes slightly homoerotic - in stark contrast to the portrait of Major Higginson.
At second glance the room is not so full of men, with Vernon Lee appearing in an androgynous portrait. She wholeheartedly rejected gender conventions, wearing severe masculine clothing and refusing to conform to feminine fashion tropes. She chose her name ‘as it had the advantage of leaving it undecided whether the writer be a man or a woman’. The cavalier poised for action is, in fact, Ena Wertheimer, caught by Sargent’s photographic vision and transmitted to canvas ‘au premier coup’ (at first stroke), masquerading in a moment of frivolity as the Duke of Marlborough, whose clothes were left in the studio for his sitting.
At the height of Sargent's career ‘dressing up’ was a huge part of high society social life, with women making up to four daily outfit changes. In the ‘The Age of Innocence’ set in 1870s New York, Edith Wharton describes women’s dress as ‘their armour, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it’.
Fashion houses like the House of Worth supplied lavish dresses to wealthy young British and American women. Costumes were also popular, and fancy dress balls were the grandest and most fashionable ways for hostesses to garner acclaim. Inspiration came from art, history, mythology, folklore and other cultures. In his 1933 book, Nineteenth-Century Costume and Fashion, Herbert Norris writes ‘these picturesque functions were organised by the foremost hostesses of the nineties on an unprecedented scale of magnificence, and were attended by all the aristocracy.”
The middle section of the exhibition touches on the complexity of cultural appropriation; European imperialism saw an influx of novel goods including clothes and textiles, and vibrant colours achieved by newly developed synthetic dyes, along with new fabrics and patterns from colonised cultures, spurred on the excitement of new fashions and fancy dress. The great exhibitions of the late nineteenth century celebrated colonial expansion, exhibiting people as well as their native dress which Sargent saw and painted. He would continue, as generations of European artists had done before him, to use traditional West Asian clothing in his work.
Towards the end of the exhibition women are collapsing in heaps of satin. At this stage in his career Sargent had moved away from portraiture and was painting figurative scenes. His paintings show women lounging in huge gowns in Alpine meadows. By the turn of the century women’s fashion had become more refined and restrained, and dresses were slimmer and shorter, yet Sargent still had older studio dresses he wanted to paint people in. One dress appears in several of the paintings in this room: he took it with him on trips abroad, lugging it up mountains or across beaches to create fantasy scenes. His love of painting fabric is more evident than ever and one painting in which his niece appears seven times, in a white shawl, bears not her name but that of the fabric ‘Cashmere’.
Sargent and Fashion is showing at Tate Britain until 7th July 2024.
