The Met Casts New Light on the Oeuvre of John Singer Sargent

The enduring consequences of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, a shockingly risqué portrait of a young socialite that scandalized Belle Époque Paris, have reverberated among art and fashion enthusiasts for more than a century. Arguably his best-known portrait, Madame X has been featured prominently in survey exhibitions of his work—including the Isabella Gardner Museum and Tate Britain’s joint “Fashioned by Sargent” exhibition from 2024—and could even be considered a pinnacle of the Met’s permanent holdings. In the museum’s upcoming “Sargent and Paris,” exhibition, however, his practice is finally permitted to step out from behind her dark shadow. 

“This is [Sargent] at his most intense and ambitious and uninhibited,” says curator Stephanie L. Herdrich of “Sargent and Paris,” which focuses on the pivotal decade that the artist spent not only in Paris, but on holidays to Madrid, Capri, Morocco, and beyond. Through the context of his travels, Herdrich creates an exhibition that pairs the young Sargent’s studies, lesser-known paintings and drawings, and depictions of his muses with the grand portraits that reference those influences.

“You see him experimenting and studying every art and looking at everything, absorbing it and making it his own…he’s successful very quickly, and just keeps becoming more and more ambitious and finding his voice, until Madame X,” Herdrich tells Surface. “The intensity of this period yields really interesting, compelling works. It’s so much about how he’s pressing at the boundaries of what’s accepted, and then he presses a little too far for his comfort.”

Here, and in the exhibition itself, Herdrich touches on a crucial undercurrent of Sargent’s practice: a desire to walk the line of provocation, pushing the boundaries of propriety in a way that goes on to change the medium of portraiture. Before the scandal of Madame X culls his appetite for pursuing such ambitious experimentation, he produced two of the most arresting paintings in the entire show—both of which found the artist on the right side of courting scandal.

The piercing gaze of the 11-year-old girl depicted in Pailleron Children owes itself to a battle of wills between the 24-year-old artist and the young sitter, who, over a rumored 83 sittings, disagreed about how she ought to be depicted in the work. Another, Dr. Pozzi at Home is one of Sargent’s less celebrated portraits of men. In it, the doctor is depicted in an unconventional state of undress: he wears only a dressing gown—possibly over a chemise—in night slippers. While the exhibition creates no link between the two works, one can’t help but think of how, just a century earlier, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s own depiction of Marie-Antoinette en chemise at the Paris Salon scandalized what was then the kingdom of Franc

“I do think that in today’s world, there’s such a preoccupation with image making, self presentation, and how we present ourselves to the world. That’s a tale as old as time,” Herdrich says of why Sargent’s portraits continue to resonate, even now. “Not only does he convey a lot about his sitters, but his art, it compels us. It’s bold, it’s interesting. It makes people curious about the people and the artist and the way we create our own images.”