Patrick Bade
Sargent and Belle Epoque Portraiture

Patrick Bade - Sargent and Belle Epoque Portraiture

- We have two drop-dead gorgeous, glamorous portraits here from the the Belle Epoch. There’s the Marchesa Casati by Boldini on the left-hand side, and Lady Agnew, by Sargent, on the right hand side. So this is a period when a glamour portraiture, sophisticated society portraiture, really reached its height. And Belle Epoch, that term was invented after the First World War, looking back to the period before in a sense of nostalgia. So it covers the period from circa 1890 up to the outbreak of the war in 1914. And certainly if you were wealthy and well connected and didn’t have too many moral scruples about social injustice, this was certainly one of the best times in history to have lived. So the term Belle Epoch, it has connotations of glamour, luxury, elegance, sophistication, cosmopolitanism. But it also has, it takes on some negative connotations of self-indulgence, hedonism, as I said, social inequality and so on. If you want to live and breathe the atmosphere of the Belle Epoch, I recommend going to Le Train Bleu Restaurant at the Lyon. And I’m going to make some of you very envious by telling you, this is where I’m going to eat tonight, actually. After I’ve finished my lecture, I’m meeting some friends there, purely by coincidence. It wasn’t planned to go with this lecture. It was opened in 1901. You can see how absolutely gorgeous it is. Cuisine, impeccable, famous for its wonderful lamb. But you don’t really go there for the cuisine. You go there for this absolutely fabulous, over-the-top Belle Epoch decor.

Now, when photography was invented, in the 1830s, and it became more widely disseminated, in the 1840s, it meant that everybody, down to almost the poorest people in society, could have their portrait made. When there was the first exhibition of photographs in Paris, around about 1840, the artist Paul Delaroche famously said, “From today, painting is dead.” And I’m quite sure that the invention of photography put quite a lot of artists out of business, the ones who are catering to the lower end of the market. But those who were catering to the upper end of the market actually found a new lease of life because frankly, who wants to be remembered like this poor woman in this photograph? No, we don’t want to be remembered that way. We want a better version of ourselves. We have a painting here on the right by the Franz Xaver Winterhalter, who was the top fashionable portraitist in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. And you can see that he can make even Queen Victoria, who was a famously plain woman, he can make her look a real babe. She looks pretty sexy, doesn’t she, in this portrait on the right hand side. Here is Sargent, Wyndham Sisters on the left. We have two family portraits here and they both date from the 1890s. The Wyndham Sisters, by Sargent, on the left, and a photograph of my family on the right hand side. Not particularly glamorous, as you can see. It’s actually my great-great-grandmother at front right, and my great-great-great grandmother at front left, and two aunts. Well, I’m not sure that even Sargent could really have made those into drop-dead gorgeous subjects, but I’m sure he’d have had a good go at it and he would’ve enhanced them in many ways.

There’s another Winterhalter of the Princess Sayn Wittgenstein, painted in the 1830s. And she has, this portrait I would say has many of the characteristics you associate with Belle Epoch glamour photography. I’m sure she was a beautiful woman, she was a famously beautiful woman. But I think she’s been enhanced, no doubt, by Winterhalter under all the trappings of elegance and luxury. The difference between this and the portraits I’m going to talk about today is really one of technique. This one is very, very smoothly painted. Has none of the luscious painterly qualities that Sargent can bring to his portraiture. When I stand in front of this picture, which is in the National Gallery of Scotland, it is just so sumptuous and so gorgeous. You feel, there’s gorgeous liquid splashes of paint on her sash and her dress. You feel you could eat them with a teaspoon. You could lick them, they’re so gorgeous. And again, this is Angerer who was certainly the greatest portraitist in France in the middle of the 19th century. And this is a portrait of the Baroness De Rothschild, who by all accounts was a very attractive and a very charming woman and she comes across that way in Angerer’s portrait. But there’s, again, there are all sorts of other interesting differences. Angerer is very good at rendering fabrics, that’s for sure. And it’s a gorgeous dress, isn’t it, that the Baroness is wearing?

But once again, very smooth, very licked in its technique. And also very different in its presentation of a glamorous woman. So even if Lady Agnew is lounging languorously backward in her Bergere, her luxurious chair, there is something quite challenging about her gaze. Baroness de Rothschild, everything about her suggests passivity, the rounded shoulders and the pose of her body. Lady Agnew, of course, has much square, much almost masculine width of both shoulders. And as I said, there’s something slightly challenging about her. When we get to the 1870s, I would say that fashionable portraiture really reached a low point. Here are two of the top fashionable artists of the 1870s, Leon Bonnat on the left hand side, Alexander Cabenel on the right hand side. And they’re boring. What can you say? They’re just boring. So how did portraiture renew itself? How did we get this wonderful Golden Age of Glamour Portraiture in the Belle Epoch? I would say that the leading artists, and mainly talking about Sargent today, but there are others, they renewed the art of portraiture from two sources. One was that they were looking at old masters. And in the 19th century, of course, by the middle of the 19th century, there were big national museums. There was the Louvre or the National Gallery and they could go and they could study these masters. This is Franz Hals on the left hand side and Van Dyke on the right hand side, the Lords, John and Bernard Stewart by Van Dyke, on the right hand side. Van Dyke was a great inspiration through the bravura of his brushwork, very characteristic, slashing, brilliant, free, brushwork, which gives a sense of life and animation to the picture on the left hand side.

Of course, Van Dyke is unparalleled in his marvellous rendition of luxurious fabrics and accessories. Look at those wonderful boots and that languid, elegant hand on the left hand side and the other hand holding a crumpled glove. And the whole thing shimmering, absolutely gorgeous. And yes, it’s that that dull brushwork of the academic painters of the 19th century gave way to the brilliance, the brilliantly expressive brushwork of the old masters. Here again, Franz Hals, as I said, with this characteristic lively slashed brushwork, hatching really. And it’s a detail from Velazquez portrait, of course, from Las Meninas. Look at this detail of that little princess. Now, if I showed this to you out of context, and I said, who painted this? When was this painted? I think you’d be very likely to suggest that it was painted by an impressionist painter. You’d think it was by Renoir or possibly Monet. Another important source for the Belle Epoch portraiture was English aristocratic portraiture of the 18th century. We’d had a Golden Age of Portraiture in England in the second half of the 18th century. This is Reynolds on the left hand side and Gainsborough on the right hand side. These paintings were hugely admired. In real terms, they fetched fabulous sums of money in the Belle Epoch. Largely it was the American robber barons who were inflating the price of these paintings. People like Frick and Huntington and so on, who were desperate to buy them up.

And two artists from the end of the Golden Age of English Portraiture, Rayburn on the left-hand side and Lawrence on the right hand side, again, a fluency of brushwork. A sense of spontaneity, an intimacy on the Rayburn on the left-hand side. These are elements that are very much admired in the Belle Epoch, imitated by Sargent and others. And this is combined with the influence of the French Avant-Garde from Monet onwards, Monet and later the Impressionists. This is a portrait on the left hand side, a group portrait by Orpin, who is a belated rival, I would say, of Sargent. And he shows various English artists of the Belle Epoch sitting underneath a painting by Monet, his portrait of Ava Gonzalez, which had been acquired by the National Gallery. And the painting is entitled, Homage to Monet. Another artist who was a major influence on the portraiture of the Belle Epoch was the American, James McNeil Whistler. And in fact, if you were not such an obnoxious personality, I would have classified him as a Belle Epoch portraitist already. And what I mean by that is, of course, if you’re going to have a success as a society painter, you have to not only make people look good, you have to make them feel good. And Whistler had this very prickly, caustic personality that people felt very uncomfortable with, so he never really had a great success as a society painter. But here are two paintings he made quite early in his maturity of his Irish mistress, Jo Hifferman. So these are not commissioned portraits. Most of the portraits I’m going to talk about today, not all of them, but most of them are commissioned and were paid for with very large sums of money. But so what is, these date right back to, well, the white girl on the right hand side, the first one, Symphony in White Number One, that dates back to 1863. And the one on the left followed soon after.

So it’s actually pre Belle Epoch in terms of date. But we have so many of the elements that we associate with Belle Epoch portraiture. The eclecticism, you know, the idea that you could choose, like you’re picking from a box of chocolates. So we have here an influence of, strong influence of Velazquez of Spanish painting. Very strong influence, particularly noticeable on the left hand side, of Japanese art, Japanism. Not just with the Japanese objects, but the way the pictures are composed and the way the flowers come and intrude on the right hand side. And we have this lusciousness. It’s so gorgeously, they’re both so gorgeously painted. It’s a technique, as I said, very much borrowed from Velasquez. And Duggart commented on the delicate muddiness of Velasquez technique. A painting that was commissioned and paid for with a large sum of money to Whistler, this is the portrait of Cecily Alexander. This was painted between 1872 and 1874. And again, you can see the very strong influence of Velasquez, detail from Las Meninas on the left hand side. This loose luscious fluid application of paint. Again, on the right hand side, you can see very obvious Japanese elements in the composition, the flattening of the space, the way it’s signed with a monogram with a butterfly, flowers intruding on the right hand side. But Whistler apparently was a terrible bully to this little girl and she had to pose for over 70 sessions of hours at a time.

And he was insisting on combining her hair in a certain way. And he insisted on her dress being ironed in a certain way. And she remembered the ghastly experience of posing for Whistler ‘til the very end of her life. Again, to reinforce the influence of Japanism, Ron asked me at the end of last week, or he mentioned or he pointed out the Japanese elements in Secard, who had been very influenced, of course, by Whistler and Duggart. As I said the last time, by the 1890s, the Japanese elements in Secard’s work are in the bloodstream, really, of the European Avant-Garde. It’s the generation before Whistler and Duggart who were the first to really creatively make use of Japanese features. And you can see the very obvious connection here, the posing of the figure with the main body seen from the back. The flattening of space and so on is a very Japanese element.

• Now, perhaps the first successful society portraitist to whom I would give the label Belle Epoch is Carolus-Duran, who you see here on the left hand side, in slightly pretentious self-portrait, I would say. And he looks also slightly pretentious, really, posed in his magnificent studio on the right hand side. His real name was Charles Durant, with a T on the end, but that obviously wasn’t smart enough for him so he changed his name to Carolus-Duran and he lopped off the T from the end of his name. Now he started off his career as a great buddy of Monet and working in the style very, very close to him. And he could have gone the same direction of Monet as a sort of pioneer of the avant-garde. We have here a portrait of Carolus-Duran on the right hand side, by Monet. And a portrait of Monet by Carolus-Duran on the left hand side. I think you’d be hard put, actually, to distinguish between the styles of these two artists. Very, very close to one another.

• But of course, Monet had quite a tough life. He was several times rejected at the Sentinel, being constantly attacked by the critics. And I think Carolus-Duran, he didn’t want that. He wanted success, he wanted to make money. So he was prepared to absorb elements of Monet’s art but to modify them, to make them more acceptable to fashionable society. Like Monet, he of course was very, very keen on Velasquez. And this is a delightful portrait by Carolus-Duran of his daughter, clearly again, very influenced by Velasquez, Las Meninas. Incidentally, if you want to see the work of Carolus-Duran, he came from Lille. And the Musee de Beaux Artes in Lille has the biggest collection of his work. This is a little girl grown up to a very beautiful young woman. And she married the famous playwright George Fido, author of Fasis, that are still much loved in France to this day. He was a very, very handsome man. He was a famously handsome man. Unfortunately, he was also famously unfaithful and a terrible womaniser. So I’m afraid that here they look so beautiful, this young couple, the time that they married. But it wasn’t a happy, it didn’t turn out to be a happy marriage. Now we get, of course, to the main star of this lecture, which is John Singer Sargent. Here he is in his studio in Tite Street, in London, which used to be visitable. It belonged to an artist who would let you visit it. He has since died, so I don’t know whether it’s possible to visit it anymore. But here is Sargent in front of his most famous, or his most notorious portrait of Madame X. I’ll be talking more about that later. And he was born in Florence in 1859 to a moderately wealthy American family who could have stepped out of the pages of Edith Wharton or Henry James.

They didn’t need to earn a living. They loved art, they were very cultivated, and they could move from one European city to another. So he grew up very, very cosmopolitan. He was completely trilingual in English, Italian, and French. And I think he did have a sense of being American. In fact, he was not in America very often. Of the 69 years of his life, only eight years were spent in the United States and they were largely because of the First World War and towards the end of his life. But I think he refused to give up his American passport when he was offered a knighthood. I think it was more important to him to keep his American passport than to receive a British knighthood. So he came to, well, he was obviously a very, very precocious, amazingly gifted artist. And the inevitable place to go to study was Paris. So you went to Paris. What you did was you enrolled in the studio of a successful academic painter. And he sort of sniffed around and he must have looked at Bouguereau, Cheron, Cabanel, the top masters. But instead, it’s very significant that he chose Carolus-Duran. Partly, I think, because Carolus-Duran was a portrait specialist and that’s clearly what Sargent wanted to be as well. But also because Carolus-Duran was much less stuffy and academic than the others here. He had a much more painterly, a much more modern technique and that’s what interested Sargent. This picture from 1879 was Sargent’s debut at Salon and it is a portrait of his master, Carolus-Duran, and a very masterly debut it is indeed. But so while certainly picking up some good painterly technique from Carolus-Duran, he was going through the mill of an academic education and that involved drawing from plaster cast and it involved drawing and painting from a live model. That was central to any academic education for an artist in the 19th century.

And it was a practise that drawing and painting from the nude model was something that Sargent continued to do all the way through his life and it was something very important to him. And this very beautiful watercolour drawing of a model, 'cause he knew all the famous poses, all the famous statues. On the right hand side, we have the Barberini Faun, which is in the bibliotheca in Munich. And in my imagination, I think here is the model who comes to the studio and he takes off his clothes and he says, mettre, how do you want me today? And Sargent said to him, “Well, give me Barberini Faun.” So any professional model would’ve known what to do and he will have gone more or less into the pose of the Barberini Faun. The painting on the left hand side came up for sale at Christie’s. I think it must have been about, I was there, I was working at Christie’s at the time, and I remember being rather struck by it. It’s by a minor French academic artist called Jean Benner, you can see his name at the top. And it says Jean Benner Capri. Well, Capri was already a very popular tourist destination and it was a destination for artists and Sargent went there as well around the same time. And in these places, Rome, Florence, Capri, where artists gathered, a beautiful girl or a beautiful young man could earn a very nice living as an artist model. And I think it’s, I think it’s pretty clear that this, it’s either the same model or it’s a sister. There are slight differences, aren’t there? slight differences in the nose, but very, very similar. It’s an academic exercise to paint a head in profile like this. And you can see that Jean Benner is very competent.

A little bit more, how can I put it, it’s a bit dull. Sargent already, you get a sense of a somewhat greater freedom, I think, than in the Jean Benner on the left-hand side. So the year that Sargent arrived in Paris was 1874. And I know lots of you have done courses in art history 'cause lots of people have mentioned it. And if you’ve done a course in 19th century painting, 1874 will ring lots of bells because it’s the year of the first impressionist show, the show that caused a scandal, that gave the name impressionism to the movement because of the painting you see top left, Monet impression, Sunrise. I wonder whether Sargent arriving in Paris in that year, whether he saw that exhibition or not. The painting on the right hand side is painted by Sargent in that year. You can see it’s dated at the bottom, 1874. And it’s a painting that looks like it was painted from life en plein air. But it’s painted in some kind of arbour, so you’re sheltered from the direct sunlight. But you have, there’s a real sense of outdoor light, broken light coming through the leaves. In that sense it points towards Impressionism. But if you compare it with the Monet, you can see it’s a much more constricted, a much more limited palette of colours that he’s using. And it’s much closer, in fact, to a French artist of an older generation, Courreau, and I put to compare, this rather cool, silvery light, these lovely silvery greens, but also already the broken sunlight. That is Courreau at bottom left. As I said, I think Sargent, at this point, much closer to Courreau than he is to the Impressionists. Another artist who’s very much en vogue, very, very influential at this time, Jules Bastien-Lepage and he’s a slightly forgotten figure these days, but massively influential and admired in the 1870s.

And this is a painting by Bastien-Lepage. He is an artist of what the French would call juste milieu. In other words, he’s somewhere between the conservative academic artists, the Salon, and the more radical painting of the Impressionists. He’s painting out of doors, it’s a plein air painting. But it’s not a painting in full sunlight with broken light and it’s more carefully drawn and constructed. So this painting on the right hand side, which is another early exhibit at the Salon of Sargent, it’s of the wife of a wealthy newspaper proprietor. Her name was Madame Poirot. And for me it’s very clear that the artist that he’s been looking at and that he’s influenced by is Jules Bastien-Lepage. 1880-81, he goes off to Venice, thanks to this wonderfully atmospheric painting of an interior in Venice. And again, it’s very clear that the artist who is in the back of his mind is Velasquez, this shadowy interior with the opening at the back with the light coming through. And I think Velasquez, Las Meninas again, is also behind this picture dated 1881. That’s one of his first great masterpieces as a portraiture of the Boyt Children, a wealthy family from Boston. A marvellous picture, I think, this. And what I like about it so much, I think there’s a total absence here of the kind of icky sentimentality that you so often get in Victorian or 19th Century paintings of children. And an interest in them, I think as individual human beings. It’s intriguing, there’s a sense of isolation, I would say, of these four girls. There’s not much sense of them loving one another or playing with one another. There’s a certain kind of psychological dislocation between the four figures of the girls.

Here are the children of the Poirot Family. And again, I find this a very, 18th and 19th century paintings of children can be so sentimental and soppy and cliched. These two children, again, there’s not much sense of a loving family here, is there? But there’s a real sense of individual, he’s looking at these children not as cute children but as individual human beings with quite strongly marked personalities already. And for comparison I put in Millet. Millet an artist I admire but I’m sort of using him as my whipping boy in this lecture by comparison with Sargent. So this is a much more conventional 19th Century picture of a cute child. Now we really come to a kind of peak. In the early 1880s with these two portraits. Madame X, Madame Cointreau on the left hand side, and Dr. Potzi on the right. Apparently, they were lovers for awhile. But now they live far apart 'cause he’s in Los Angeles and she is in, is she in the metropolitan? She’s on the East Coast. I think she’s in the metropolitan. So they only get together when there’s a big Sargent retrospective. Both, to my mind, they’re a very, very sexy pair, a very sexy portrait, but with an element of the sinister in both of them. The first of the two, actually, is Dr. Potzi. A very daring portrait, he’s shown in his dressing gown. I think probably at this stage, Sargent still, he had made his study already at the Salon in Paris. Probably his teacher and other friends said, I think this painting is maybe a bit daring to send to the Salon. So he didn’t actually exhibit it in Paris. He exhibited, first of all, in Brussels. Brussels was always a good try out place in the 19th Century. Now Dr. Potzi became one of the most distinguished doctors of the late 19th Century and he was a very important gynaecologist.

He pioneered new techniques of gynaecology and published a book on methods of examination, bi-manual methods of examination. So his hands, of course, are the tools of his trade. And Sargent really puts great emphasis on the beauty and elegance of his hands. A highly-admired man, although probably he’d be in trouble today, with the me too movement, since he was a man who was quite notorious for his love life. He was a lover of Sarah Bernhardt for awhile. In fact, she remained devoted to him for the rest of her life. And she used to refer to him as Dr. Amor and said that he was the best lover that she’d ever had. And when later in life, she had terrible, terrible pain in one of her legs and she wanted it to be amputated, it was to him that she appealed and he actually performed that amputation for her. Now, Madame Cointreau was a society woman. She was what, at the time, was called a professional beauty. And you had these, in New York, in London, in Paris, I suppose probably in other European cities. And she was a woman who was, I suppose, a kind of social climber. And she was invited everywhere because of her beauty and elegance. So she was regarded as being an ornament to any kind of social gathering. And Sargent obviously saw her at one of these gatherings and he was very struck by her looks, which were not conventionally pretty looks. They were, he wrote a letter describing her and saying she was very striking with her, she wore a lot of makeup. He said she was so fallade, so covered with makeup that her skin had the colour of lavender blotting paper. And her hair, of course, as you can see, was hennaed.

But he ends this actually not terribly flattering description, but sort of an inventory of her looks, by saying that she has the most elegant lines. So I think he proposed this portrait, to paint her portrait. And there was a, I would say, a kind of conspiracy between the two of them. What they both wanted, of course, was that her portrait would be considered the Portrait of the Year. This is another very 19th century concept at the Royal Academy in London, Salon in Paris, every year there would be a portrait that everybody was talking about, everybody admired, that was very controversial, it was very discussed. And the artist who painted the Portrait of the Year was made for life because everybody would go to him and they’d want to have their portrait painted by him, and he could charge huge sums of money. And the subject of the Portrait of the Year was also made socially because everybody would want to invite the subject of the Portrait of the Year. So both of 'em had a lot invested in this portrait. So Sargent painted a number of studies of her or drew a number of studies for her in different poses, I think trying to explore this idea that she had these incredibly elegant lines. You can see her sort of lounging languorously on a sofa here on the left hand side. And on the right, her rather extraordinary profile, this with his very pointed nose. But this is the pose that he finally came up with. And this was sent to the Salon of 1884. And it caused a scandal. Now the thing was you wanted, to a certain degree, a scandal. It was very difficult to get the balance right.

You wanted a painting that everybody was talking about. But he seems to have overdone, overplayed and the scandal turned out to be for him and for her, a very negative one. People stood in front of the portrait and they jeered at it. And it was violently attacked by critics and people were apparently shocked by it. And you think, what? Why? Because the Salon was full of the most outrageously erotic pictures in the 19th century. So what is so terrible about this? Why was this so shocking? And I think it’s partly, of course, her decolletage, she is revealing an awful lot of flesh. But apparently the detail that really shocked people was a wardrobe malfunction, that one of the straps of her dress has fallen down the side of her shoulder. And of course, she is in danger of a much worse wardrobe malfunction if she’s not very careful. So she and her husband demanded that Sargent would remove the portrait from The Salon, which he refused to do. And the painting, of course, was unsold and it remained in his studio for a very long time, as you saw in the photo I showed you earlier. And he made the concession, of course, of repainting the strap so that it was less provocative. So that he was now persona non grata in Paris. He said friends cut him in the street, nobody wanted to have their portrait painted by him. So I think he would’ve liked to have a Paris-based career, but that became impossible after the scandal of 1884 and he moved to London and I would say that was Paris’s loss and London’s gain that he did so. But it’s also in the mid to late '80s that he discovers real Impressionism. Not the watered down version of Bastien-Lepage, but the version of Monet. And he becomes very friendly with Monet and went on painting trips with him.

And he started, his landscapes were painted en plein air like the Impressionist pictures directly from life. And at the bottom right hand side is a painting by Sargent of Monet painting a landscape. And on the left you have the very same landscape that Monet was actually painting in the picture by Sargent. Test for you. Which one of these is by Monet and which one is by Sargent? Well, I’ll just, I’ll give you 10 seconds. But actually of course it’s, I hope you’ve all guessed it’s Monet on the left and Sargent on the right. But not so easy to tell the difference. You can see that in pictures like these, Sargent has adopted a palette of colours and a technique very, very close indeed to that of Monet. Again here I think it’s a little bit more obvious that it’s Sargent on the left and Monet on the right. So he’s, of course, he’s a man of independent means, and so he can live the life of the Belle Epoch. He can travel around Europe. Travel was becoming much more comfortable. Hotels were becoming more comfortable. You could travel by train from one city to another. I love this little picture on the left hand side, which is obviously a comfortable hotel room. And he’s just arrived and you can see he’s only half unpacked. Telling detail there is that this is, at this point, and it’s not probably 'til a bit later, not 'til after the 1880s, that you are likely to find hotels and then only in great centres, that have running water in the bedroom and en suite baths and toilets.

So here clearly there is a eur and a basin for your washing needs. And these I’m going to show you just briefly, all these wonderful pictures that are not commissioned portraits. This is Sargent travelling, having a very good time, enjoying himself, living this self-indulgent, comfortable life of the Belle Epoch. Now when he moved to England in 1884, he went to stay with friends who had a house in the Cotswolds. And over two years he painted this picture called Carnation Lily Lily Rose, with which he made his debut at the Royal Academy in London. And it Sargent was always, I think, quite a calculated artist. He knew how to please, he wanted to please. And this is a picture that effuses, I would say some pre-Raphaelite elements with some modern French Impressionist elements and charming young girls. It was obviously designed to please his English audience. It’s a virtuoso piece of painting in the way that it captures that moment of change in light at the end of the day, which is quite a brief moment. You know, between the daylight and the evening light. And you’ve got the dying evening light and you’ve got the artificial light of the lanterns. But it’s not an Impressionist painting, actually. It’s certainly not painted in one go, on-the-spot, it was actually painted over two summers. And there’s a letter surviving to the parents of these girls. He sent them seeds 'cause he wanted them to plant particular flowers that he wanted to paint in this picture. Now though his great moments of triumph came in 1892 with the portrait of Lady Agnew that you see on the right hand side. This was the first time that he painted a picture that was deemed the Portrait of the Year. So she was, of course, socially made. She was a minor Scottish aristocrat, but overnight she was famous and invited everywhere because of this picture.

Then between 1892 and 1897, Sargent painted the Portrait of the Year every single year at The Salon. And, of course, he wiped the floor with all his rivals. On the left is a portrait by Luke Fildes of Princess Alexandra. It dates from the following year, 1893, competent, I suppose. How dull, how stiff, how boring, how un-sexy compared to Sargent. Now once people had seen Sargent’s, who else would you want to have paint you? He became the go-to artist, especially for beautiful women. And a comparison here, once again, with the earlier Winterhalter portrait of Eugenie, the Empress Eugenie, which has quite a similar harmony of colours, doesn’t it? But very bland, blandly painted compared to the Sargent. Look at that. Isn’t that absolutely, unbelievably luscious and sumptuous, gorgeous, succulent application of paint. He could be very good painting men too. And people often dismissed Sargent as a superficial flatterer. I think that’s quite wrong. He could be very, very astute and penetrating. And when he is really inspired, I think he is pretty well as good as it gets. He’s right up with the really great portraitists of the 17th Century, like Velasquez, Franz Hals, and Van Dyke. Again, we’ve got a comparison between a very conventional Victorian portrait of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, stiff, boring, stuffed shirt. And so we’ve got two images here really of the British Empire.

On the right is Sir Frank Swettenham. He was in charge of the Malay Straits. And when he left office in 1904, this portrait was commissioned of him. And I find it very fascinating. Apparently, he got on very well with Sargent and he liked the portrait because the portrait was not commissioned by him. He wanted a version of it. So he commissioned an artist to make a copy. Sargent took one look at the copy and said, no, no, no, no, give it to me and I’ll repaint it. So this, which is actually in, I actually like it better than the original. This is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s an amazing picture. And if I had one image, to choose one image for what the British Empire was about, I would choose this one, actually. It’s such an insightful portrait. The sense of arrogance and entitlement. Look at the hand, that’s like a claw that’s clawing all these riches that come from the British Empire. It’s an amazing, amazing picture.

• Sargent, like a lot of portraitists, you know, when he switched on and when he switched off. Now which of these two do you, which two of these two men do you think really interested and fired him up? The man on the left actually is Henry James, who was a lifelong friend. And you’d think, well he would’ve done a good portrait of Henry James, but how boring is that? He looks like your bank manager. Whereas Coventry Patmore, who is not somebody he knew well. It was again a case of he’d actually seen him in the distance at a social event and he’d go, oh, that’s an interesting face. So it was Sargent who proposed to paint the portrait of the poet, Coventry Patmore. And he liked his sort of fiery leonine expression. And apparently when he was painting the portrait, he deliberately made lots of very provocative comments politically to get Coventry Patmore all fired up with this rather fierce expression. Another painting that became the Portrait of the Year, 1894, This is W. Graham Robertson. And Sargent had been commissioned to paint his mother. And in those days, as I’ve mentioned several times, a woman couldn’t go out alone, certainly not to an artist’s studio, unaccompanied by a man, so she actually took her son with him. And Sargent did a very dutiful and not very interesting portrait of the mother, but he found the son much, much more interesting. And he discreetly put out inquiries through a mutual friend would this young man be interested to pose for him? Of course, he was incredibly flattered. I mean, it was very hard, however rich you were, however beautiful or amazing you were, to get Sargent to paint your portrait. So later when he knew Sargent much better, he said, what was it? 'Cause he wasn’t a particularly handsome man. He said, what was it about me that made you want to paint my portrait? And Sargent said two things, your overcoat and your dog. And he was very slender and he had this very nice, tailored overcoat and apparently, well, it was painted over a period of months in the spring and the early summer.

And as the weather warmed up and the studio warmed up, he actually undressed underneath the coat and each time Sargent would pull the coat tighter. He also placed him in this, what he found a very uncomfortable and awkward pose, to emphasise the slenderness of the body. The dog was an elderly sheep dog with the name of Mutton. And I love the way Sargent has painted it. Apparently, he was a very cross, ill-tempered dog. And when it arrived at the studio, it would always want to bite Sargent. But as it had lost its teeth, Sargent was quite happy to put out his hand and let the dog bite it. Sargent in big demand with the aristocracy as well as the plutocracy. We’ve got both here, of course, 'cause this is the poor, well not poor, very rich, but poor in a victim sense, Consuela Vanderbilt, who was married off to the very uncongenial Duke of Marlborough and dutifully produced the heir and the spare before running off with somebody more appealing. And you can see that Sargent has really exaggerated her neck. Apparently she did have a long neck and he pleaded with her not to wear a necklace. He said, I don’t want to, I want to really emphasise the neck.

And that is, of course, one of the oldest tricks in the book for a flattering portraitists is to add a couple of inches to the neck and it will improve anybody. I know, I’ve done it myself with portraits. In this case, he was painting a portrait that was, in a way, an answer to an earlier family portrait of the Marlborough family, dating from the 18th century. Two very famous and successful portraits of women, Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth in Shakespeare’s play, and Isabella Stewart Gardner. Both wonderful portraits, rather hieratic, slightly sinister. Wonderful detail here of Ellen Terry. It was apparently not one of her best parts. She wasn’t really suited to the fiercer roles of Shakespeare. But what impressed everybody, of course, was her dress. She had this incredible dress which had real Beatles wings sewn on into the fabric. George Bernard Shaw was quite funny about it 'cause her dress was so spectacular and everybody else’s clothes were in the cast were made out of Scottish tweed and rather dull. And he said it was evident that Lady Macbeth did her shopping in Byzantium, whereas she shopped for the rest of the family locally in Scotland. So Sargent, his sexuality is a matter of conjecture, but I feel fairly sure that he was homosexual. There were plenty of rumours, of course, he’d never married and he was very, very shy and very discreet. So if he was homosexual, he wasn’t advertising it to the world. I think he has an empathy with women and an understanding of women that may be connected with his sexuality. Although one aspect of his depictions of women is very fantasia-que or very typical of the time is this sense of women being possibly dangerous and threatening and menacing. This is Lady Sassoon, on the right hand side, born Aline Caroline de Rothschild, looking, I think, ever so slightly sinister in her black dress with her huge black hat. And the Honourable Venetia Stanley, who’s a kind of, she’s a jeune femme fatale. I would not want to mess with her if I found myself facing her down a dark alleyway.

So both, hmm, quite alarming in a way. Women, in his paintings, seem to be enormous. They seem to be giantesses, the Acheson Sisters here, on the left, Mr. and Mrs. Phelps on the right. But also I think he’s very sensitive to female vulnerability, even distress. These two portraits, the wringing of the hands, there’s a sense of anxiety. The woman on the right hand side, she was the wife of Edward Carson, who was the lawyer who prosecuted Oscar Wilde. I mean, she does not look like a happy woman to me. I suspect that may not have been a terribly happy marriage. Ah, and Lord Dalhusie, a Scottish aristocrat. Boy has Sargent got his finger on the pulse here. He really, really, rather as, of course, Van Dyke did. That extraordinary mixture of arrogance and maybe an element of insecurity too. This languid arrogance that you find in the males of the English upper classes. Believe me, I know all too well. Having worked for Christie’s for 34 years, it’s something I think I encountered on many, many occasions. Look at this face, oh my God. And you can see this is somebody who, a wonderful telling detail, of course, is the strip of white flesh across the forehead. This is somebody who spends a lot of his time out of doors shooting things, but wearing a hat. Too, there is an element of caricature and there is an element of a stereotype you can say in both these two portraits. You’ve got the English aristocrat on the right hand side and the Jewish plutocrat on the left-hand side.

This is a Wertheimer. I know you’ve had a whole lecture on the Wertheimer portraits. Fascinating group of portraits. 12 portraits commissioned from Asher Wertheimer from Sargent over a period of more than a decade. Almost every year there would be a Wertheimer portrait in the National Gallery in London. And Sargent became very close to the family, he was almost like a family member, really. But these portrait, now what do you, what what do you think about this? I mean, in a way is this even anti-Semitic because he’s such a stereotype really, of a wily Jewish businessman holding his phallic cigar. The dog, which is the black dog, which is almost part of it with its wet tongue hanging out. It certainly conforms with anti-Semitic stereotypes by other artists. Steinlan, top left, and George Gross, in the middle. Here are daughters of Asher Wertheimer, Ina and Betty. Ina, on the left hand side, was probably Sargent’s closest female friend. And he painted this portrait spontaneously when one day she arrived in his studio. She was a very exuberant character and she swept into his studio with her cloak flying behind her. And he said, oh, you look like you’ve just arrived on a broomstick and she thought that was very funny. So you can see actually he’s paint, there is a broomstick on the right hand side. So it really does look like she’s just flown in on her broomstick. Now the extraordinary thing is that Asher Wertheimer, as I said, his paintings were exhibited every year at the Royal Academy and they were always praised as paintings, but they always also elicited a lot of really ugly anti-Semitic comment. For instance, the portrait of the two sisters here. One, I think it was in the Times the critic said, this is an excellent portrait of a loathsome racial type. This is, I think, a rather, I’m abusing poor old Millet again, actually.

Here are two nice English aristocratic girls painted by Millet, the slightly, unfortunately named Hoare Sisters. Very uptight looking, aren’t they, compared to the Wertheimer girls. Now Sargent became so associated with Jewish clients, he painted so many portraits of Jews and they were often his best portraits. And this brought a lot of comment at the time. And somebody actually said to him, why, what is it? Why are you always painting Jews? What is it about Jews that interest you? And he gave a very good answer, which, and I believe this. He said that he liked painting Jews because they had such mobility of expression on their faces. And I think, especially in English society, upper class English society, upper class English people, it’s probably slightly better these days, but at that time they were trained from the day they were born to hide their feelings, to mask their feelings, to suppress any expression of feeling. Just look at the difference between these two faces, these two pairs of faces. And I always, when I always say to people, now which pair of sisters would you rather sit down to for dinner? Well, I know which pair I would rather spend an evening with. I’ve run out of time. There’s a lot more to be said, but I think I should finish. And I can see there are quite a few questions so I’m going to go into the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, I did the Clint, yes, well, actually, I saw it in the paper. I’m not sure I registered how much it sold for, but I know it was had a huge estimate. Yes, I was going to have a talk.

Anderson’s a wonderful artist. He was possibly the closest rival to Sargent. And they often landed up painting the same people. San Francisco just had a show, Sargent in Spain. That would’ve been a very interesting show. There was a wonderful show in Paris about 15 years ago of Sargent and Soroya who would be the Spanish equivalent of Sargent.

Yes, I agree, those Sargent children look quite wary, don’t they? Fru fru, yes, definitely fru fru.

And here’s somebody mentioning Soroya, of course. And Katrine, who loves Sargent. I’d say Sargent is quite a variable artist, but when he’s really switched on, boy is he fantastic. Thank you for your kind comments.

Sargent’s watercolours, Sargent is such a virtuoso. He’s a wonderful draughtsman, amazing charcoal drawings. I was going to have a whole section about the charcoal drawings. I mean that’s a testing technique and he’s brilliant in charcoal and he’s a… Watercolour again, such a difficult technique and he’s a marvellous, marvellous watercolorist.

No I don’t, no Alfredo, I really don’t think he was a lady killer. Well, Angerer, you don’t really see the brush strokes, of course. It’s very lit, the strokes are blended to one another. Very, there are hardly any individual brush strokes visible on the surface on an Angerer. and the Julian Barnes book, yes, I do recommend it. I enjoyed it enormously about Dr. Potzi, the man in the red coat. Lavender, yes, I think it probably did. It was a fashionable colour at the time, wasn’t it?

You think that the long neck is too long? That’s Mayra. Yes, that dress still exists, of course. And it’s in her house, isn’t it in Sussex, I think. I don’t know if it’s on permanent show there. Yes, there are two great Boldini portraits of Verdi.

Thank you, nice comments. Of course, times had moved on. The Wertheimer Sisters are 20 years after Madame X. So I don’t think the decolletage, in itself, was necessarily shocking. As I said, I think there was, the fact that they were Jewish, certainly, and shown as very Jewish, I think, in their facial types and so on, that certainly provoked a lot of ugly comment from critics at the time. Yes, all those paintings from Isabella Stewart Gardener. I do hope I live long enough to see them rediscovered.

Thank you, 85 million was it at Sotheby’s, right. It’s true, Dr. Potzi was fatally shot by a dissatisfied patient. Apparently, it was something to do, he’d operated on him and he was impotent afterwards.

This James who likes both, oh yeah, I don’t want to rubbish Millet. Millet’s a wonderful artist in his way. But I think, as I said, I’d rather spend an evening with the Wertheimer girls than those rather prim looking Hoare Sisters.

Thank you all very much. Well, I should be going off to dinner shortly. And we’ll see you, still in the Belle Epoch very much, on Sunday with the age of Dame Nellie Melbourne.