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John Singer Sargent

JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is one of the paintings that his friend Henry James, both novelist and art critic, had in mind when he wrote that the artist possessed a “slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” Sargent’s sense of design, his ability to capture character, and his facility with a brush were remarkable. He also had an almost unerring sense of how to establish a professional reputation, making and selecting for display paintings that would attract attention for their dash and daring but that would not be dismissed as too avant-garde. In his early years, the artist was careful to show both portraits and subject pictures, perhaps as yet uncertain as to which genre would provide him with the best path to critical acclaim.⁶ In Sargent’s Daughters, the two kinds of subjects he favored are inextricably linked. Both a likeness and a genre scene, the painting brilliantly combines specificity and mystery.

Sargent was a talented young artist in 1882, the year he painted Ned and Isa Boit’s daughters. Like his patrons, he was an American thoroughly at home in Europe. He had even been born abroad, in Florence, to expatriate American parents who traveled perpetually from Italy to Switzerland, France, Germany, and back again. His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a quiet physician from Philadelphia, although the family originated in Massachusetts. Fitzwilliam had given up his medical practice at the urging of his wife, Mary New-bold Singer Sargent, a forceful, restless, romantic personality and an amateur watercolor painter; she, like the Boits, much preferred life in Europe to the United States. Sargent grew up with two sisters: Emily, a year younger and his constant companion, and Violet, who was fourteen years younger. (Violet was the same age as Ned and Isa Boit’s daughter Jane.) Described by his childhood friend Vernon Lee as “an accentless mongrel,” Sargent spoke and read four languages fluently. He loved music, was a talented pianist, and befriended many composers and performers. These literary and musical interests provided amusement for Sargent, but they never took him away from his devotion to painting. From a young age, he sketched constantly, and by 1870 his father was reporting, “My boy John seems to have a strong desire to be an Artist by profession.”⁷

Sargent first studied art at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, but in 1874, when he was eighteen, his parents decided to move the family to Paris, where their son could take advantage of the best training programs available. There, Sargent enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the illustrious state-sponsored art school that emphasized instruction in the traditional skills of academic figure drawing and painting. He also joined the atelier of Charles-Auguste Emile Durand, known as Carolus-Duran, a young, popular, and fashionable French portraitist who had won acclaim for his bravura approach to painting and for his exciting images of stylish society women.

Paris in the 1870s had taken its place as the art capital of the Western world. Earlier in the century, Rome had been the city that attracted an international audience of aspiring artists, lured there by the remnants of the classical past. But Paris looked forward rather than back. During the Second Empire (1848-70), when France was led by Napoleon III (first as president and later as emperor), the city was reinvented - both physically, with the dramatic reorganization of streets and neighborhoods undertaken by Baron Haussmann, and psychologically, with the establishment of the city as the world’s hub of elegance and style. Government patronage raised the standards of artistic training and also helped to promote the desirability of French art; both actions made Paris a magnet for aspiring painters and collectors from around the globe. These activities were only briefly interrupted by the destruction caused by the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and its aftermath; when the violence had ceased, and despite the continually shifting political landscape of the Third Republic (1871-1940), Paris easily resumed its position as a cultural capital.⁸

The art world in Paris was multifaceted and complex, and was soon divided between convention and innovation. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which had been founded in 1648, promoted a time-honored approach to artistic training, favoring a methodical series of courses that allowed its students to master the represention of the human form. With these programs and through the annual state-sponsored exhibition called the Salon, traditionalists promoted art that dealt with uplifting historical and religious themes, crafted with scholarly precision and to such a high degree of finish that viewers were meant to perceive these paintings as windows into another world. At the same time, building upon the radical innovations of midcentury French painters like Gustave Courbet, who felt that art should reflect the real world rather than idealized visions, other artists began to reject academic principles, instead making paintings that represented contemporary motifs and celebrated the evidence of the maker’s hand. Scenes of rural labor, images of the city, and other motifs drawn from modern life grew in popularity. Paintings once considered too abbreviated and sketchy for public display were now accepted as finished works. Critics had been debating the bold paintings of Edouard Manet since the 1860s, torn by his simultaneous respect for tradition and his translation of such images into a relentlessly new vocabulary. In his Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay), for example, Manet used a traditional subject - the female nude - but instead of veiling her in the cloak of mythology, he deliberately chose an obviously contemporary model and setting and employed a singularly flat and direct application of paint. Into the midst of this intoxicating mix came the Impressionists, painters whom Manet befriended and supported. These independent artists held their first joint exhibition in May 1874, showing works that told no uplifting narratives, that represented only glimpses of the ordinary activities of the modern world, and that emphasized the individual gestures of the artist’s brush. Sargent and his family arrived in Paris the day after the show closed.

There can be no doubt that almost from the moment he started studying with Carolus, Sargent was at the head of his class. His fellow student and friend James Carroll Beckwith reported of him, “His work makes me shake myself,” while Edwin Blashfield recalled “a Boston boy named Sargent, a painter who was the envy of the whole studio and perhaps a bit the envy of Carolus, himself.”⁹ From his teacher, Sargent acquired much more than lessons in technique. At about this time, the French writer and critic Emile Zola had dubbed Carolus “a clever man” for his ability to make the avant-garde palatable. According to Zola, Sargent’s tutor was able to take the innovations of the controversial Manet and make them “comprehensible to the man in the street.” He “dr[ew] his inspiration from [Manet] but within limits, seasoning it to suit public taste,” Zola explained.¹⁰ Though Carolus had been an early admirer of Courbet’s realism and was a friend of Manet’s, his own mature work was less challenging. He shared Manet’s interest in Spain and Spanish art, and echoes of its painterly fluency are clearly evident in his work. His portraits and figural compositions, with their attention to fashion, glance, and gesture, vividly document contemporary life. Carolus’s paintings were exciting and sometimes suggestive, but they never crossed the line into confrontation or vulgarity, charges that had been leveled against Manet’s work. Instead, Carolus managed to combine modernism with tradition, earning himself a place as a refreshingly new painter but not a shocking one. Sargent picked up that skill from his French master, learning it alongside Carolus’s advice on technique and his recommendation to put the study of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez at the top of his agenda. Sargent was interested and in-spired by the art of the modern movement, but like his teacher, he merged those innovations with tradition, amalgamating a wide variety of sources into felicitous and adventurous works that could be appreciated by a wide range of viewers.

Despite his natural artistic abilities, Sargent took nothing for granted and spent the next three years working steadily to develop his technique and to train his eye, studying both the old and the new. He visited museums and the Salon, and in April 1876 went to the second group exhibition of the Impressionists at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, where he would have seen works by Claude Monet (whom he is said to have met), Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and many others. A month later, he had left the studio he shared with Beckwith at 73 rue Notre Dames des Champs and was aboard the SS Abyssinia with his mother and sister, making his first trip to America, the homeland he had never seen. He went to Philadelphia, meeting relatives and family friends and attending the Centennial Exposition, where he was entranced by the extensive display of Japanese art. Sargent traveled to Newport, New York, and up to Montréal; he saw Niagara Falls with his family and then journeyed with a friend from Paris as far west as Chicago, but by October he was back at his studies in Paris. That winter, he began his first important portrait, a likeness of his friend and fellow American Fanny Watts.

Sargent would paint many Americans in Paris, including the Boit girls, but aside from his family, Fanny was the first one to model for a formal portrait. He intended to display the canvas in the spring of 1877 at the Salon. The show, a juried competition, was the preeminent place for contemporary artists to achieve critical recognition, and it would be Sargent’s first public exhibition. For this important occasion, it seems likely that (instead of fulfilling a commission from the Watts family) Sargent asked Fanny to sit for him, a common practice among aspiring young painters, who recorded one another or their families or friends in a bid to establish their careers. The strategy worked for Sargent: the portrait was accepted by the jury and was well received, he started to be offered some commissions, and he was honored the following year when his teacher Carolus agreed to pose for him.

Despite this early and immediate acclaim as a portrait painter, Sargent had not yet decided that he would specialize in that arena. The year after his success with his portrait of Fanny Watts, he sent to the Salon a sparkling genre scene of fisher girls on the beach in Brittany, En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish) (1878, Corcoran Gallery of Art). In 1879, he displayed both his portrait of Carolus-Duran and a sensuous image of a peasant girl in a field in Capri. He also showed his work at smaller, more experimental venues. Sargent consciously demonstrated his versatility as a painter through the variety of his contributions, calculating them to appeal to a broad group of potential critics and patrons. It was a tactic he continued almost every year to increasing acclaim. By the fall of 1881, Sargent was working on one of his largest and most dramatic genre scenes, El Jaleo (1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum). Ideas for the picture had been percolating in his mind since 1879, when he had visited Spain and sketched the gypsy dancers there. Over the next two years, most likely working in his Paris studio, Sargent made numerous studies in oil of musicians and dancers, experimenting with poses for his finished composition, as well as two smaller paintings showing swirling dancers under a night sky. However, when it came time to craft his final version, which he planned to display at the 1882 Salon, Sargent painted with great speed and assurance. He ignored contemporary studio practice, which called for the creation of a finished sketch at a smaller scale that would be transferred to the large canvas by a grid system or through tracings or projections. Instead, Sargent started afresh, moving rapidly across the surface of the enormous canvas and rarely going back to correct his figures or to rework the details. Once his ideas were set in his mind, they flew from his head to his hands. El Jaleo is a tour de force of sheer painterly bravura.¹¹

Of course El Jaleo was not a portrait, and thus Sargent was able to work freely, painting for his satisfaction alone without worrying about creating a likeness or pleasing a client. But he had not set portraiture aside, for at the same time that he was finishing El Jaleo, Sargent was painting a large portrait of a close friend, Louise Burckhardt, today known familiarly as Lady with the Rose (1882, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Sargent had known her for a number of years; their families traveled in the same social circles and some friends even suspected a romance between the two, although it seems likely that their attachment was exaggerated by Louise’s mother, to whom the portrait is dedicated. Sargent shows his subject, dressed in a fashionable black gown, standing before a light gold curtain, presumably in his studio. Right arm akimbo, Louise holds out a white rose in her left hand, striking a pose similar to the one Velázquez had employed for his dignified likeness of the court jester Calabazas (about 1630, Cleveland Museum of Art), which was then in a Paris collection.

Sargent showed both of these paintings at the Salon in 1882, once again offering a genre scene and a portrait to demonstrate his breadth as a painter. If anything linked El Jaleo to Lady with the Rose (displayed with the title Portrait de Mlle ***), it was the sheer scale of their large canvases, which made Sargent’s presence at the Salon quite impossible to ignore. The two paintings also made something else very clear: Sargent had now given up one master, his teacher Carolus-Duran, for another, Velázquez, the old master so esteemed for his lively handling of paint and his seemingly spontaneous and credible arrangements of figures. No longer merely praised as the talented student of one of France’s leading artists, a pupil whom “M. Carolus Duran should be proud of having formed,” Sargent had come into his own. He was now a mature artist whose astonishing works were reminiscent of the great Spaniard himself.¹² Twenty-six years old and a painter on the rise in the most sophisticated and modern city of his age, Sargent understood that his contribution to the next year’s Salon would be eagerly anticipated and much discussed. That canvas would be The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.