The transformative exhibition John Singer Sargent in Paris at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (27 April-3 August 2025) demonstrates Sargent’s dramatic growth as a painter from the time he went to study art and live in Paris in 1874, at 18, until his departure a decade later. The exhibition gathers paintings set in countries he visited during the years he lived in Paris, which included Morocco, Spain, and Italy, as well as pictures of the ocean from transatlantic crossings, but the heart of the show consists of the larger-than-life-size portraits he painted in Paris. In these works, Sargent redefines the role of the artist.
Highlighting Sargent’s rapid progression from art student to landscape painter to celebrated painter of society portraits, the exhibition focuses on his portraits, stunning in both technique and psychological complexity. Sargent’s portraits secured the painter’s admission into Parisian high society as well as celebrating and elevating the status of his subjects. By painting numerous works accepted for the annual official French exhibition of art known as the Salon, Sargent, born to American parents in Florence, crossed national borders.
His works celebrate not only Parisian aristocrats but many kinds of outsiders in Parisian society: working-class people, people of different ethnicities, origins, people who achieved high status through newfound wealth or professional expertise rather than the accident of birth. Several works depict Albert de Belleroche, a man whom the curators speculate, in accompanying wall panels, may have been Sargent’s lover, as deduced from their correspondence. Those works provide possible models for some aspects of the portrait known as Madame X. In those depictions and the portrait of Sargent’s friend French-born British writer Violet Paget, also known as Vernon Lee, in androgynous garb, the painter also crossed boundaries of conventionally defined sexuality and gender expression. As the exhibit demonstrates in dramatic fashion, however, Madame X, the work Sargent considered his masterpiece, crossed a line too far. The scandal it provoked terminated both Sargent’s years in Paris and the social acceptance of his subject, Mme. Gautreau.
Unlike his contemporaries Monet, Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Renoir, whose paintings often incorporate recognisable slices of the city in the background, Paris is almost never visible in Sargent’s Parisian works. Only one painting in the exhibit depicts a Parisian exterior, Sargent’s haunting depiction of the Luxembourg Gardens at twilight, with moonlight glimmering on a pond. Otherwise, only brooding interiors provide the background to his subjects, though these are scenes in another sense: they are theatrical stagings which hint at a narrative. The portraits depict Parisian style through the clothing, objects, and furniture with which Sargent surrounds his subjects. The staged backgrounds contribute to the powerful illusion of people portrayed so realistically and dramatically that they seem about to speak. Like actors on a stage, they communicate more than people can when not on stage.
The painter of American heritage came of age as an artist remarkably quickly in Paris. The show consists entirely of works he made between the ages of 18 and 28. His skill in choosing subjects for portraits and treating them in a way that satisfied both the conservative gatekeepers of the Salon and the revolutionary Impressionists who were his contemporaries enabled Sargent to assimilate into Parisian society while sometimes revealing more about his subjects than they may have wished.
Sargent, a student of Carolus-Duran, who urged his pupils to paint directly on canvas, exhibited his first painting at the Paris Salon at 21 in 1877, just three years after arriving in Paris. He exhibited paintings at the Salon frequently thereafter. The two rooms in this exhibition of bravura, larger-than-life-size portraits of American expatriates and Parisian aristocrats, attest to Sargent’s technical skill and recasting of the artist’s role. In all the portraits, one is conscious not only of the subjects’ personalities but of the invisible presence of the painter. That awareness is especially pronounced in the dual portrait of Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron, the children of Edouard Pailleron (Sargent also painted their father’s and mother’s portraits separately). The younger child, the girl, confronts the painter and viewer head-on with a confrontational glare, while her older brother gives the painter a sidelong glance. Portraits like this raise questions. What is the relationship between the two people in the dual portrait? And what is the role of the portrait painter: flatterer? recorder? parental figure?
Sometimes Sargent immortalised his subjects in works that echo Velázquez’ paintings of royalty. Dr. Pozzi at Home depicts the doctor in a floor-length, blood-red dressing gown which both alludes to his profession and shows him in his private role. Although he is presented in informal garb, his long-fingered surgeon’s hands are highlighted, and the robe resembles a royal one. Sargent’s father was also a physician, who came to Europe with his wife before Sargent was born to give her a change of place after the death of their first child. Perhaps the self-assurance of Dr. Pozzi that Sargent’s portrait emphasises in his bold stance, flamboyant dress, and confident gaze salved the primal wound to the Sargent family that occurred before the painter was born. In Paris, Sargent was reborn as an artist whose talent gained him acceptance into a variety of social settings.
This imaginatively staged exhibition emphasizes the theatrical quality of Sargent’s portraits: the Lady With the Rose, his American friend Charlotte Burkhardt, holds up a single flower as if playing a scene from an alternate version of La Dame aux Camellias; each of the four daughters of Edward Boit appears spotlit amidst stagy, unusually large Japanese vases which decorate and structure the space. The girls’ clothing, nearly identical though subtly different, looks like a uniform: three of the four wear white pinafores and all wear dark stockings. The curators inventively place that painting opposite Sargent’s copy of Velázquez’ Las Meninas, clearly a model for Sargent in its portrayal of aristocratic girls. Sargent faithfully reproduces in this copy Velázquez’ self-portrait in a mirror near the back of the painting. In Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (originally entitled simply Portraits d’enfants), the mirror becomes a window, as if to emphasise the invisibility of the modern artist. The square of light, however, reminds us by his absence of the painter’s hand. In all Sargent’s portraits, the presence of the artist, though unseen, is manifested through his arrangement of his subjects and their accoutrements as well as the unspoken interaction of the subjects with the painter.
The exhibition’s theatrical presentation of Sargent’s portraits is followed by a roomful of portraits by his contemporaries, including works by Manet and Whistler as well as Renoir’s enormous, charming Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children. As Karen Rosenberg noted in her New York Times review, midway through the exhibition, one glimpses the portrait of Madame X framed in a series of doorways. The striking portrait could be the final image on stage of the heroine of plays written a few years later, Hedda Gabler or Miss Julie, for the rich black gown and deathly pale skin of Madame X imply a tragic element, as if the subject were ill or subject to some strange curse. The curators also frame this portrait in its context, exhibiting multiple preliminary sketches for the painting. Those sketches show that the muscular, outturned right arm of Madame X, as well as the modelling of her head, appear to be based in part on sketches Sargent made of his friend and possible lover Albert de Belleroche. Perhaps this was the aspect, rather than the jewelled strap that originally hung off her shoulder, which truly caused critics at the time to object so vehemently to the painting. Crossing national and class boundaries could be acceptable; crossing gender boundaries, however subtly, was not.
One room of the exhibition uses photographs to represent the 1884 Salon, with Sargent’s entry from that year, Madame X, managing at once to fit in through its traditional genre and subject (the portrait of a wealthy woman) and to stand out for its daring and unconventional subject, Virginie Gautreau. Madame Gautreau stands with her white powdered flesh gleaming in her dramatically exposed neck and bust. Sargent appeased the scandal initially by repainting one jewelled strap so it was no longer slipping down her shoulder, but the scandal continued unabated. Critics attacked the revealing dress in the portrait and proceeded to attack Gautreau herself for her American and Creole roots.
Sargent’s Parisian career terminated with this painting, one he later deemed a masterpiece. He eventually donated Madame X to the Metropolitan Museum. In a nearly career-ending misjudgment, Sargent’s focus on line and texture led to the destruction not only of his own reputation in Paris but that of Mme. Gautreau. He retreated to London with the help of other American expatriates such as Henry James.
The lushness of Sargent’s portraits indicate a painter in love with his medium if not his subjects. The exhibition’s chief curator, Stephanie Herdrich, notes in accompanying materials that by 1907 Sargent wrote to a friend claiming about portraits “I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another especially of the Upper Classes.” Yet the people in his portraits continue to haunt us. It is tempting to imagine stories about the fates of the four daughters of Edward Boit (unconventional for the time as none ever married), or the ill-mannered children of Edouard Pailleron. Sargent’s compatriot and advocate, Anglo-American novelist Henry James, and Sargent both entitled works Portrait of a Lady, as if James intuited and interpreted the stories of Sargent’s subjects from their multi-layered portraits.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art show captures Sargent’s Parisian style through its theatrical arrangement, explores other artists’ influence on him by including major works by several of his contemporaries, and provides the dark walls and good light characteristic of Sargent’s own works to decorate the galleries. The exhibition illuminates the talent for psychological portraiture, colour, texture, line, and composition of the painter who, incredibly, produced these works in a decade beginning at 18, as if sprung at a young age full-blown from the studio of Carolus-Duran like Athena from the head of Zeus. This groundbreaking exhibit also provides insight into a Parisian society that, within limits, welcomed and continued to welcome into the 1960s and beyond various kinds of outsiders: expatriates, artists, writers, homosexuals, creative women. In Paris, Sargent first discovered and developed his central subject: human beings of all ages in all their individual complexity.
