John Singer Sargent’s parents, Mary Newbold Singer and Fitzwilliam Sargent, left Philadelphia in 1853 to recover from the tragic death of their first child. They wandered around Europe, living frugally on savings and inherited money.
The future painter was born in Florence in 1856, followed later by his sisters, Emily and Violet. The children followed their mother on drawing expeditions, and much of their informal education took place in museums.
John showed such talent that his parents accompanied him to Paris in 1874 to help him find a suitable teacher. The young man’s refined manners and fluent French enabled him to penetrate French society in a way few Americans did.
The story of his formative decade in Paris, from 1874 until 1884, is told in the sumptuous exhibition Sargent: Dazzling Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay in the city. (It debuted at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York, in April.)
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The Salon was the biggest exhibition of contemporary art in Europe, held annually at the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Élysées. At the Salon, the Sargents chose Carolus-Duran, portrait painter to the grande bourgeoisie, because he was considered innovative without being controversial.
Sargent’s impressive portfolio, much of which is shown in the exhibition, won him entry to the Académie des Beaux Arts as well as to Carolus-Duran’s studio. When his portrait of Carolus-Duran was shown at the Salon in 1879, critics said the student had surpassed the master. L’Écho de Bruxelles declared Sargent “American by birth, French by his paintbrush”.
Sargent and his family resembled the American expatriates who people the novels of his friend Henry James, so steeped in European culture that they could no longer live in the United States. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “when good Americans die they go to Paris” captured the yearning for civilisation that sent affluent late-19th-century Americans flocking across the Atlantic.
Sargent’s sitters included writers, painters, composers and American heiresses who married European noblemen for their titles. His canvases convey dramatic tension and a sense of mystery. They have a literary and theatrical aura, prompting the viewer to wonder what has happened and what is going to happen.
Sargent’s portraits of children are particularly effective. In 1880-81 he painted Édouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron, aged 15 and 10. Their sour expressions, Marie-Louise explained in her memoir, were the result of posing through 83 sessions with Sargent. The painting is often used as a cover for The Turn of the Screw, James’s Gothic horror novella about children who commune with malevolent ghosts.
The following year Sargent painted the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a Boston lawyer who brought his family to Paris in the hope of becoming an artist. The daughters pose in the darkened entry of their expatriate parents’ apartment. Three girls stare at the viewer. The fourth leans against a large Japanese urn that dwarfs her.
The painting is a visual allusion to Velázquez’s Las Meninas and bears a striking resemblance to The Artist’s Studio, by Sargent’s friend John Lavery, the Irish painter. “Both painters were born in 1856. They corresponded, knew each other and each other’s work, and had a lot in common stylistically,” Caroline Campbell, director of the National Gallery of Ireland, says.
In the US and Britain, Sargent came to be considered the greatest portrait painter of his generation. But in Paris, where he first achieved fame, he was largely forgotten. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition is the first monographic show of his work in France.
In Paris, Sargent was not yet the painter of rich Americans and British aristocrats. Early works portrayed unfortunate souls, one a beggar girl, another a gypsy, with compassion. Unlike French contemporaries, he made no effort to record the modern city. In his only Parisian scene, a fashionable couple walk through the Luxembourg Gardens under a full moon at twilight.
Sargent continued to travel, using Paris as his base. He painted Breton women in wooden clogs and barefoot children on the beach in Setting Out to Fish. That painting, like the sun-dappled table beneath an outdoor canopy in The Wineglasses, could have been painted by his Spanish painter friend Joaquin Sorolla, whose work was exhibited alongside Sargent’s at the Petit Palais in 2007.
Sargent’s bucolic painting of Rosina Ferrara, a local beauty, in Among the Olive Trees in Capri is a tribute to Corot. Smoke of Ambergris, painted in various shades of white, shows a young Moroccan woman permeating her clothes with incense.
Sargent approached Virginie Gautreau, a famed Paris beauty, through a mutual acquaintance. “I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty,” he wrote. “You might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.”
Gautreau accepted and the two became friends. Unusually for him, Sargent completed numerous studies, and worked on the painting for weeks at Gautreau’s country house in Brittany. It shows her clad in a low-cut, sheath-like black gown, standing haughtily with one hand on the edge of a table, her face turned in profile. When the portrait was completed, Gautreau wrote to a friend calling it a masterpiece.
Stephanie Herdrich, who co-curated the exhibition for the Metropolitan, says Gautreau was “a modern-day celebrity” whose activities were covered by French newspapers. “She was known for her elaborate gowns, for painting her skin with lavender powder to make it look paler, for dying her hair with henna and painting on her eyebrows. Sargent saw her as a self-created work of art.”
Sargent knew the portrait was provocative, but he was stunned by the uproar it caused when the Salon opened in 1884. “People gathered around the portrait in shock, criticising the portrait but mostly criticising the sitter and her appearance,” Herdrich says.
The critic Joséphin Péladan wrote that the portrait was “Interesting for her ugliness ... Her décolletage adorned with silver chains ... is indecent and gives the impression of a dress about to slip ... The pearly whiteness gives her skin a bluish hue – cadaverous and clownish at once.”
Gautreau and her mother begged Sargent to withdraw the portrait from the exhibition. He declined, but when he took it back to his studio he repainted the chain strap falling off Gautreau’s shoulder in the upright position. “It was an obvious acknowledgment of the scandal, a capitulation,” Herdrich says.
France has always been considered a country of sexual permissiveness, and it seems odd that a portrait of a woman in evening dress could cause such a furore, especially 21 years after Manet’s Olympia showed a naked prostitute receiving a bouquet from an admirer.
“It was a period of tension between conservative forces and the avant-garde, so there were a lot of artistic scandals,” says Pascal Perrin of the Musée d’Orsay, chief curator of the exhibition. “Eroticism was possible in painting but not in a portrait. Gautreau was a strong, self-confident woman, and portraits of women were supposed to show the husband’s success, not the woman’s personality.”
Both curators detect an undercurrent of anti-Americanism. Gautreau’s French parents had emigrated to Louisiana, where they owned a plantation. Her father died fighting on the Confederate side in the War of Secession, and her mother brought her to Paris at the age of eight. She attended French schools and married a French businessman twice her age.
“A French woman might have got away with it, but since French society considered Gautreau American, the portrait was seen as vulgar,” Perrin says.
“The collaboration between these two young Americans seeking celebrity in Paris ruffled feathers,” Herdrich says. Sargent was 28, Gautreau 25. “It was a period of a huge infiltration of foreigners into France, of tariff battles and anti-American sentiment, of robber barons and the acquisition of immense wealth in the US. There are parallels with today.”
It was not customary to identify sitters, so the portrait was originally entitled Madame ***, though everyone recognised Gautreau. Sargent was bruised by the outcry and kept the painting behind a curtain in his studio, where people queued to see it. Gautreau died in 1915. The following year he sold the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum, saying it was “the best thing I have done”.
Sargent had earlier painted Dr Samuel Pozzi, a well-known Parisian gynaecologist, in the unconventional setting of Pozzi’s home, in his dressing gown. The painting is a study in reds, echoing Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X.
Pozzi was a pillar of French society who revolutionised hospital hygiene and wrote a gynaecology text that remained a reference for half a century. Sargent’s portrait of Pozzi inspired the British novelist Julian Barnes to write The Man in the Red Coat, his 2019 book.
Pozzi was tall and slim from practising fencing, his favourite sport. He had numerous affairs, including a decade-long tryst with the actor Sarah Bernhardt, who addressed him as Dr God. Sargent sent the portrait for exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, and showed it in Brussels, but never in Paris, perhaps to avoid scandal.
Men increasingly adopted more feminine clothes and manners in the late 19th century. Pozzi wears a ruffled white shirt beneath the dressing gown. His long, elegant fingers toy with the belt. The mischievousness of the portrait derives from its ambiguity.
Sargent was discreet about his own sexuality, but he is assumed to have been gay or bisexual. The sensuous male nudes of his early years can be seen in the exhibition. After Sargent’s death, the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche wrote that Sargent’s sex life “was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous.”
“When I look at Sargent’s work I see the work of a queer artist,” the design journalist and photographer Mark O’Flaherty said in the documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion & Swagger, made to coincide with recent Sargent shows in Boston and London.
“His obsession with fashion, the mannerisms and his interest in shaping fabric mark him out as a gay man immediately, and the way he manipulates the clothes and the way he makes his subjects stand, using these overtly effeminate and camp gestures.”
Many of Sargent’s friends were gay. The exhibition includes a hastily executed, vibrant portrait of his long-time friend Violet Paget, a French-born British feminist and lesbian writer who worked under the name Vernon Lee.
Sargent commuted between Paris and London for two years after the Madame X scandal. Encouraged by Henry James, he settled permanently in London from 1886. The British initially thought him too “Frenchified”, but his 1887 painting of two English girls lighting lanterns in a garden, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose triumphed at the Royal Academy and was purchased by the Tate Gallery.
Sargent nonetheless stayed in touch with France, particularly with his friend Claude Monet, whom he painted in impressionist style. “I deeply regret that I shall have nothing for the Salon,” he wrote to Monet in 1887.
“I really do not want to be forgotten in Paris. It would upset me if I were considered a poor idiot, who has ceased to exhibit there to make a statement. I beg you, if you hear from our friends that I am a deserter or an ingrate, or that I am sulking, to contradict such nonsense.”
In 1889, Monet and Sargent worked together to purchase Manet’s Olympia for the French state. That year Sargent exhibited with the US section at the Paris World’s Fair. France awarded him the Legion of Honour. His 1892 painting of the Spanish dancer Carmencita was bought by the Musée du Luxembourg, in Paris, the state-owned “museum of living artists”.
Sargent continued to exhibit in the Salon until 1905 and to visit France until 1918. He always considered himself American, declined a knighthood and died in London in 1925, a book by Voltaire in his hand. He was buried in Surrey.
Sargent’s painting had gone out of fashion. Only one French newspaper, Le Gaulois, put his death on its front page: “This American born in Florence, who loved France and lived in London, had in his youth declared himself to be one of ours.”
John Singer Sargent: Dazzling Paris is at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, until January 11th, 2026
