Sargent’s Internationalism: The Artist as Cosmopolitan

Born in Florence to expatriate parents and widely familiar with Europe from boyhood family trips, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) displayed social savoir faire already in 1874 at eighteen on arrival in Paris to train as a professional painter. His portfolio of drawings earned him immediate acceptance into Carolus-Duran's atelier and revealed skills that amazed his fellow students. At the end of a five-year apprenticeship, Sargent's portrait of his teacher won recognition at the 1879 Paris Salon and led to several commissions from French admirers, in effect launching what later became unrivaled international prestige as a portraitist. This got underway in London by 1885 but extended also to this country, with Boston as its center. Carolus' portrait for example was exhibited here in 1880 and again in 1888 in the first one-man exhibition of Sargent's career, where it joined fourteen other portraits, most of them made the preceding November during his visit. Sargent made many other later visits to Boston that also included portraits, and his portrait work commands admiring audiences still today. This course looks closely at key examples to explore how and why he was able to triumph in this demanding field within three different cultural milieus in a way that has made his achievement exceptional. Sargent's achievement however also included works that transformed several other established categories of painting at the time. One of these was performance images where figures are seen in dramatic contexts that expand descriptive reality to suggest personality traits, or special talents, or even cultural identities. Celebrated examples include El Jaleo of 1882, Madame X of 1884, and Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in 1889. A moving later example is Gassed of 1919, its World War I soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Central too are Sargent's imposing mural projects in Boston: the History of Religion begun in 1890 for the Boston Public Library and the final work of his life, the rotunda and stair images at the Museum of Fine Arts, undertaken in 1916. Fittingly, Sargent's cosmopolitan skills come to a resounding conclusion with these projects, not in London where he lived, but in Boston.