A True Visual Sensualist

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

England made his fortune. He was what the English upper classes--both hereditary aristocrats and nouveau riche --had wanted but not found: a portraitist who could perform in the Grand Manner. There had been none since the death of Thomas Gainsborough a century before, and Sargent, with his tremendous fluency and genuine empathy for the social levels of his sitters, filled the gap to perfection. He had no interest in politics past or present, was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony. As a biographer who knew him pointed out, "He would have been puzzled to answer if he had been asked how nine-tenths of the population lived; he would have been dumbfounded if asked how they were governed."

This gave him the best possible qualification for painting the great and the good. He simply took them at their own valuation, producing vivid epitomes of social standing as he did so. His portrait of Lord Ribblesdale, for instance, remains the definitive image of the late-Victorian equestrian male: superbly grave and self-contained, tall as a tree, and yet with a touch of carelessness in the flare of his buff hunting waistcoat and the dashing arabesque of paint with which, in a single loaded stroke, Sargent conveyed the fold of his breeches--a gesture as assured, in its way, as any brushstroke by de Kooning. With women Sargent was in his element, and icons of late-Victorian and Edwardian femininity rise from his work with wonderful directness: those all-time-champion Jewish princesses the Wertheimer sisters, zaftig and bursting with life, or the paler and more shadowed beauty of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw.

As far as anyone knows, Sargent never had--or was even rumored to have had--a sexual relationship in his whole life; nor did he ever do a painting of a nude. His sensuality was wholly visual and confined to the surface of things--the confused glitter of light on a Venetian canal, the rumplings of fabric, the porcelain skin of an upper-class face. The sexiest picture in this show is Two Girls in White Dresses, circa 1909-11. (It is actually one girl, his niece, painted twice, lying on an Alpine hillside.) Except for the faces, not an inch of skin is visible. They are completely swaddled in cotton and cashmere, but the agitation of the cloth into powerful folds and hollows, together with the passivity of the poses, gives the image a disconcerting sensuality--not striptease, but layer-tease.

Nevertheless, the incessant production of highly paid portraiture began to chafe on Sargent. Clients kept interfering, pestering him to take this out and paint that in. "It seems there is a little something wrong with the mouth!" he complained to one of his sitters, about the demands of another. "A portrait is a painting with a little something wrong about the mouth!" In 1907, at the age of only 51, Sargent decided to give up doing "paughtraits," as he disparagingly called them--except for those commissions he couldn't refuse, like a 1917 portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent wanted to travel more and do landscapes, especially in watercolor--and next only to Winslow Homer, he was the finest American watercolorist of his time.

He also had ambitions as a monumental painter, which resulted in a set of weird murals--Pre-Raphaelite throwbacks with overtones of realist modeling--depicting The Triumph of Religion for the Boston Public Library. But Sargent the public artist was never much good. His big commissioned war painting, Gassed, 1919, is full of compassion and even nobility but is dead as mutton.

It's the smaller, more private works that really count, and in them it's Sargent's skill that gets you (almost) every time. True-blue modernists liked to call it "empty virtuosity"--in their book, virtuosity itself smelled of emptiness anyway; works of art had to be gritty and sincere and full of doubt, in homage to Papa Cezanne. But some kinds of virtuosity are deliciously full; they are self-delighting in their reluctance to turn every stroke of paint into the residue of a moral struggle that may not have really happened; they make difficult performance look easy, and give weight to casualness. Sargent was that kind of painter, and it seems pointless to rebuke him for it--especially at the end of a century whose art he did not for a moment aspire to change.