It's All About the Pose.... and the Clothes

Go and see John Singer Sargent's paintings at Tate Britain and you come away with the impression of Sargent as an incredibly savvy stylist and promoter of his sitters -- the elite of London, Paris, New York and Boston. That's not to downplay his talent as an artist, because Sargent and Fashion shows he was brilliantly skilled, producing images with real staying power. You may not know much now about the people -- then famous -- he painted more than a century ago, but the pictures themselves still exert a fascination. 

Flamboyant -- that's perhaps the adjective to use when describing Sargent's most striking works, and flamboyant's definitely the word for Dr Pozzi at Home. 

Samuel-Jean Pozzi was a Parisian gynaecologist, with links to avant-garde art circles. You might expect a late 19th-century professional to be portrayed in a dark suit, but Sargent shows Dr Pozzi in a crimson dressing gown, wearing Turkish slippers. Standing in front of red curtain, it's as if he's on the stage. Sargent is then perhaps not so much the artist as the stage manager of this dramatic scene. This painting, done when Sargent was in his mid-20s, was his first to be shown at the Royal Academy in London. His friend Vernon Lee, we learn, said it had "an insolent kind of magnificence, more or less kicking other people's pictures into bits". 

Drama, then, and here again in the painting known as Madame X. 

Madame X is Virginie Gautreau, like Sargent an American in Paris and seemingly cut from the same mould. Gautreau was admired in Parisian social circles for her appearance, which, we're told, she enhanced with exaggerated white make-up and striking gowns. You might think that dress is pretty daring for 1884, but it's not as daring as Sargent's original version of the painting, which showed a strap slipping off her right shoulder. Critics at the Paris Salon denounced that as indecent, and Gautreau's mother lamented the damage to her daughter's reputation. Madame X herself called it a masterpiece, and Sargent protested he'd painted her "exactly as she was dressed". 

As Oscar Wilde was to write a few years later, "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." 

Sargent loved black. He adored the work of Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. One of the best of the many anecdotes in this show tells how Sargent, on a visit to Claude Monet, couldn't do any work because the Impressionist didn't have any black paint. 

Black is certainly the dominant colour in the first painting you see: this picture of Lady Sassoon, a friend of Sargent and a frequent subject in his art, wrapped in a taffeta opera cloak.

The cloak itself is displayed alongside, and the comparison gives you a really good idea of how Sargent manipulated the clothes his sitters wore to great effect. Draped over a mannequin, you catch a glimpse, but really only a glimpse, of the pink lining to the cloak made by the Worth fashion house. 

Sargent makes his model wrap the cloak around herself, turning the lining outward to give a dramatic diagonal slash of pink across the canvas. As well as the cloak, there are several more original costumes scattered through the exhibition, but right at the start, this one provides perhaps the best example of how Sargent choreographed his materials.

Not every portrait is so ostentatious; Miss Elsie Palmer, or A Lady in White, seems calm and restrained in comparison. 

The intricate arrangement of Miss Palmer's pleated white satin tea gown against the linenfold panelling in the chapel of the historic house of Ightham Mote in Kent is quite stunning. But such perfection takes time; progress on the portrait was slow, the 17-year-old Elsie lamented in her diary.

The restraint doesn't last for long, though; you'll find Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, looking suitably dramatic in a spectacular costume in blue, green and gold; the fastidious Lord Ribblesdale, of whom it was said that "he never stepped out of his picture frame", wearing unconventional hunting garb; and W. Graham Robertson, a dandy in a ludicrously long overcoat. "The coat is the picture," Sargent told him. "You must wear it," even though it was the height of summer. 

And if Ribblesdale and Robertson look elongated, so does The Duchess of Portland, with the apparent dimensions of a basketball player in velvet cloak and satin evening gown. 

We never seem to gain much of an insight into the inner lives of the sitters, but Sargent knew how to make them sparkle, if only superficially. Here's Lady Agnew of Lochgaw looking ravishing. 

And so amid all these society portraits, what did we think was the best picture in the show? Well, it's not really a fashion painting, though the girls' white dresses were specially made for the work. 

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose is perhaps Sargent's best known work in Britain, and the feel, the light, the colours, the shapes, the atmosphere combine to make it something that seems to have a little more soul than all the bravura of what we might even call "performance art" that he produced so much of.  

Sargent moved away from the society portrait later in his career, and the penultimate room contains a series of paintings of the sort he called "intertwingles" -- sometimes sketchy compositions depicting textures, fabrics and shapes in landscapes, often painted during his extensive summer travels. There's experimentation here, and the clothes seem more about decoration than showing off. Lady Fishing -- Mrs Ormond, from the late 1880s, is an early example, concentrating on the shape of the white dress and the pattern of ripples on the water. 

It's flashy, it's splashy. And it's well worth seeing, with a lot of pictures from across the Atlantic. Dress code: casual. 

Practicalities

Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain until July 7 and is open daily from 1000 to 1800. Full-price tickets cost £22 and are available online here. We spent two hours in the exhibition. The nearest London Underground station to Tate Britain is Pimlico on the Victoria Line, about five minutes walk away.

Images

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), Dr Pozzi at Home, 1881, The Armand Hammer Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
John Singer Sargent, Madame X, 1883-84, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence
John Singer Sargent, Lady Sassoon, 1907, Private collection. Image © Houghton Hall, Norfolk 
Opera cloak worn by Lady Sassoon, c. 1895, Private Collection. Image © Houghton Hall, Norfolk
John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer (A Lady in White), 1889-90, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center

John Singer Sargent, Lady Agnew of Lochgaw (Gertrude Vernon), 1892, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 
John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-86, Tate