A True Visual Sensualist

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the last great society portraitist--the Van Dyck of his time, as Auguste Rodin was the first to say. Twenty years ago, to confess an admiration (however sneaking) for his work was to invite incredulity. Sargent? That flatterer of the Edwardian rich? That fat-cat holdover, that facile topographer of the social Alps, that living irrelevance to the concerns of modernism? But what goes around comes around. Sargent's reputation is back as though it had never gone away. Once again, if one can judge from the attendance at the Sargent show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (through May 31, and then through the summer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), he has a big public. Are its crowded galleries just another symptom of the explosion in the size of the public for U.S. museums? Or is there a new audience out there for the pictorial virtuosity Sargent represents? The latter, one hopes, but it's hard to tell.

The show bills itself as the first "complete" Sargent retrospective, which in a way it is--the Whitney Museum of American Art's attempt at one in 1986 was smaller and less intelligently planned, and this one does full justice to Sargent's watercolors, an essential side of his work. In fact there probably can never be a complete Sargent show, because his enormous early masterpiece, El Jaleo, 1882, cannot leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. But this is the best look at him in living memory.

Sargent was an American artist. With his older contemporary James Whistler, he was the first American painter since Benjamin West to become famous in England--and in France too. But he never set foot in the U.S. until his 21st year, and only rarely thereafter. The skeptic might say he hardly even qualified as an expatriate. As a boy he had no patria beyond the rented flat and the hotel room, and thus was unencumbered by the tension of nostalgia for early belonging that affects the real expat.

He was born in Florence, the son of intensely Europhile parents (his father was a New England doctor, his mother a clinging neurasthenic who couldn't bear the crude culture of her birthplace). The Sargents were not rich, but they moved from one roost to another--Rome, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, the Austrian Tyrol--for the first 18 years of their son's life. All he retained of America was his passport and some traces of accent; yet he held onto both until his death. Sargent's relation to America was neither resentful nor yearning, as it is with so many expatriates. He was a cosmopolitan, with the perfect adaptability of that type. His homeland was his talent.

It was fostered by training in Paris in the 1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds of a black dress or the petals of a white rose with the utmost economy. And the third was a sense of pictorial decorum, the artist's refusal to parade his feelings. With Velazquez, you always know what he was seeing; what he was feeling, never. So with Sargent.

The lessons of Velazquez's Las Meninas, which Sargent had copied in the Prado, sank very deep into his style and would produce curious effects tinged with melancholy, like the brilliant early portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit--four slightly alienated-looking moppets, their white pinafores gleaming in a cavern of bourgeois shadow.

By the end of the 1870s Sargent was shaping up for a glittering Parisian career. It was not to last. The curators of the National Gallery show, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, have wittily duplicated the hanging of two portraits that, seen at the Paris Salon of 1884, caused a ruckus that precipitated Sargent's departure from France to England. One is his image of a pushy American social locomotive, Virginie Gautreau, all twisting, mannered pose and lunar, greenish-white skin, identified only as Madame X. The French critics and public hated it--and her. The other is a painting of a fashionable gynecologist named Dr. Samuel Pozzi, renowned in Paris for his exquisite tastes and the breadth of his affairs, including one with Mme. Gautreau. He rises before one's eyes in a flaring crimson robe with a velvet curtain behind him, one hand on his breast, looking like some 16th-arrondissement Don Giovanni protesting the sincerity of his intentions. The pairing of the New Orleans siren and her reputed lover set off a frenzy of gossip, and Sargent, more than a little unnerved, presently decamped to London.