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Comprised of nearly one hundred works that John Singer Sargent, as a young artist in his twenties, created in Paris between the mid-1870s to the 1880s, this magnificent exhibition, features the artist’s celebrated vanguard portraiture, as well landscapes, drawings and sketches from his notebooks. Curated by Stephanie L. Herdrich, the show, which opened this summer at the Metropolitan as Sargent and Paris, has now recently made its debut at the Musée d’Orsay with its newly amped-up title Sargent Dazzling Paris, featuring Madame X as the Met’s American Mona Lisa. Although these paintings demonstrate his prestigious talent and virtuosic handling of color and brushwork in figuration, they impart Sargent’s true affinity and impulse for stylistic experimentation with the transcendent aesthetics of Impressionism and forays into abstraction  that would come to dominate his later compositions, arguably his best, toward the end of his career.

Born in Florence, Italy, in 1856, to American parents, Sargent arrived in Paris with his family for the first time in May of 1874. At 18 years old, while extremely gifted in languages as well as a talented pianist, Sargent was already determined to become an artist. Amid other American artists and writers who had gravitated to Paris—at the time the epicenter of the international avant-garde—Sargent’s artistic course began immediately as a pupil in the atelier of the well-established painter Carolus-Duran, and then at the École des beaux-arts. At this early stage in his career, Sargent’s reputation grew at an extraordinary rate as one of the most sought-after portraitists, and his work was accepted at the Paris Salon within three years after his arrival. During this short time in France, he became friends with Édouard Manet, sought advice from Claude Monet, and developed a lifelong friendship with French artist Paul-César Helleu. Using Paris as his base, Sargent traveled extensively through Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and in North Africa through Morocco.

Amid his colleagues’ conventional, stilted full-length frontal portraits filling the Salons, whose subjects dominate the field against quasi-monochromatic backgrounds, Sargent’s portraits—whether commissioned or inspired by his travels—offer a diversity of idiosyncratic poses, facial expressions, and mesmerizing settings that to this day remain unparalleled. Often detaching themselves from representation, Sargent’s backgrounds are equally as relevant as his sitters, taking on an abstract sensibility of their own. These atmospheric effects—achieved through his adoption of impressionistic techniques; the incorporation of geometric or architectural motifs; as well as through the orchestrations of details and colors—inescapably draw the eye away from the subject to the foreground and background of his compositions.

Portrayed in a domestic setting, Madame Paul Escudier (Louise Levefre), 1882, and backlit by light filtered through diaphanous curtains, this composition is only one of many examples that achieve these shifting effects. In the penumbra, she stands on a Persian rug, with only the pleats of her Indigo blue velvety dress highlighted on her chest and in the teal hues of the fabric overlayed on a chair beside her. In Head of a Male Model (1878), the figure’s pale face is crowned by a mound of black hair and punctuated by deep-set piercing eyes and a dark moustache. A luminous white cloth draped around his shoulders and black undergarment becomes sensuously enveloped by the background’s broad, spontaneous sweeps, with arabesques of cream whites and overlapping pale yellows and deep ochres creating spatial ambiguity so much so that they coalesce into one another. Other portraits that oscillate between figuration and abstraction include Parisian Beggar Girl (ca.1880) whose hair, donning a flower, angelic face, and body veiled in white fabric blend into the whitewashed wall behind her, composed of soft mottled violets, wisps and arabesques of yellows and dove-browns. Countering, the ethereality of this rendering, her melancholic gaze drifts away from the viewer conveying a sense of vulnerability. She holds a dark sash that cascades down like a chain, dissolving into striations and puddles of dark greys that evoke a sidewalk’s gutter. Moreover, at the far-left top edge of the composition a ribbed ochre rectangle—the slats of a window shade—brings us back to street life.

The extraordinary, monochromatic black-and-white composition Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver (ca. 1879–80)—evokes a blurred photograph such as those documented in Sargent’s scrapbooks in his travels through North Africa. (Coincidentally, photography was one of the inventions impacting the Parisian art world at this time.) The inky, sinuous depictions of the orchestra’s musicians suggest abstracted notes or clefs that reverberate against their dazzling white musical score sheets in tandem with visual cadences of light heightened by sonorous darkness achieved, in this case, by Sargent’s masterful grisaille technique.  

 In contrast, the centerpiece of the show, the celebrated portrait—sensationalized at the time —Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau) (1883-84), has an inanimate background. (Aside  from the deep V of the bodice of her black gown, Sargent initially painted the right strap of her black gown slipping down from her shoulder. It caused such outrage that he eventually painted it lifted back up.) Often touted as his most accomplished work, in 1907, at age fifty-five, Sargent gifted the portrait to the Met’s collection. In a quote from the accompanying letter to the museum’s director, which is cited redundantly in various texts in the exhibition catalogue, Sargent writes: “I suppose it’s the best thing [Madame X] I’ve ever done” or in one essay deceptively abbreviated to read: “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” Sargent’s hesitation and decision that same year to abandon portraiture altogether, would confirm his predilection and visionary implementation of the more avant-garde stylistic trends of the time. Take for example, his abstracted landscapes painted in the foothills of Northern Italy, more specifically The Hermit (Il Solitario) 1908, a tour de force, also in the Met’s collection.

Pictured in a dense forest amid rich earthy tones, a hermit and a pair of deer—depending on your viewpoint— appear and disappear intermittingly through intense sun dappling and rhythmic play of speckled light resulting from the strategic series of Sargent’s dynamic brushstrokes and orchestrations of color. One would hope that a sequel to this show comprised of Sargent’s late works would be organized sometime in the near future to reveal the evolution and complexity of his oeuvre. It is only fitting that his long overdue tribute to John Singer Sargent should now be held in Paris—the City of Lights—where his own brilliant career was illuminated.

Sargent and Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April 27– Sept. 22, 2025; Sargent Dazzling Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Sept. 22, 2025– Jan.11, 2026.