John Singer Sargent, Éblouir Paris

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884

As the title of the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay promises, these paintings dazzle. While Sargent's Portrait of Madame X (1884) is on all the publicity material for the exhibition, the woman with the porcelain skin and the risqué dress strap is only one of many treasures in the exhibition. What we see here is an artist immersed in the radical experiments of his time, someone who goes beyond the boundaries of what painting knew in the late nineteenth century as he discovers new ways of depicting modern life. Even though Sargent spent time in Paris, training at the École des Beaux-Arts and showing at the Salon, his work is relatively unknown in Paris and France. He enjoyed receiving portrait commissions from patrons in Europe and acknowledgment at the Salon, but the majority of his paintings are held in American museums and institutions which could explain why they are not so well known here.

John Singer Sargent, The Derelict, 1896

Among the qualities of painting that dazzles the eyes is Sargent's ability to capture an extraordinary, diffused luminosity. The light is so bright in some paintings that it is as if the work sits on a light box. Two paintings in particular struck me as studies of light, Dans le Jardin du Luxembourg (1879) and The Derelict (1896) in which a small boat is engulfed in otherwise gentle waves at dusk. The light from the setting sun, all but disappeared behind a curtain of cloud, looks to light up the ocean, soft and serene. In In the Luxembourg Gardens, the sun is higher, yellower, but the atmosphere is more even. There is an apparent dullness to the day, but on Sargent's canvas, it still radiates luminescence. In both paintings, it is Sargent's handling of white, yellow, and cobalt blue that enables water and sky to shimmer and shine. Sargent is known as a portrait painter, but in the urban paintings when people appear, faces are not important; it's the atmosphere which becomes the real subject matter. 

John Singer Sargent, Dans le jardin du Luxembourg, 1879

It will be noted that, for all its radiance, In The Luxembourg Gardens and other paintings have a blurred vision, as if Sargent is looking through an out of focus camera lens. This is perhaps because he was aware of the growing popularity of photography in his time, or because he intended to emphasize the atmosphere, not the actions in the urban setting. 

John Singer Sargent, Gertrude Vernon,
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1893

In another striking innovation of Sargent's paintings, his brush could be so loose and fast that it's hard to imagine how the resultant sketchiness escaped criticism in his time. Beginning at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where emphasis was placed on the structure and rigorous academic approach to painting, Sargent soon moved to the atelier of Carulos Duran where he did away with academic requirements and loaded a brush with paint to be applied directly to the canvas. There is much to compare to the well-known painters of his day: Whistler's handling of white, Manet's realism, Monet's use of light as subject matter and theme. In addition, the loose, fast energy of impressionist brushstrokes resonate across Sargent's canvas. But, Sargent is unlike all these other artists, working in a style all his own. His portraits, often of women with clear, flawless faces, looking directly at the viewer and surrounded by a sea of brushstrokes are radical in ways that others were yet to discover. In this sense, The Portrait of Madame X is somewhat unusual in Sargent's oeuvre as it has a studied-ness and a build up that other portraits do not. 

John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d'Hiver, 1879-1880

A painting that is both quite different in its subject matter and similar in its fast and fluid brushstrokes, is that of an orchestra rehearsing at the Cirque d'Hiver. Here, it is as if the music carries the painting away, filled with movement and an energy that captures the dynamism of the magic that happens when the orchestra is in full swing in this arena. Sargent paints the orchestra from behind and looking down, primarily because this was the view from where he sat when at the circus. However, once again, it is not the faces that matter, but the swirls and sweeps of the architecture, the swell of the music, the energy of the event. In this, his paintings are impressionist, but because they depict the rhythms of modern urban life, they are also realist. This unconventionality, even among painters who were known for their radicality, is the dazzle of Sargent's paintings shown in this wonderful exhibition.