John Singer Sargent: An artistic life well lived at the National Portrait Gallery

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

John Singer Sargent's talents and tastes are celebrated in a dazzling new show at the National Portrait Gallery

One of the world’s most celebrated portrait painters, John Singer Sargent, was evidently a cultured man, as this fine National Portrait Gallery exhibition proves by reminding us not only of his talents but of his circle of friends drawn from the great and good of late Victorian and Edwardian artistic society.

It is a heavy immersion into the artistic milieu of the period including painting, literature, music, theatre and even dance. It appears the ridiculously talented Sargent was also an accomplished pianist, too, and an advocate of Wagner and Faure, whose concerts and performances he frequented whenever he could.

Fittingly, he was born in Florence to expatriate American parents who cultivated a very cosmopolitan atmosphere. From his mother, in particular, he inherited a love of the arts and travel and a prodigious early talent for painting and sketching which propelled him towards Paris, where he absorbed the maxim that each and very stroke of the brush should make a difference.

It was a doctrine that informed a glittering career in society portraiture. Looking at the more informal portraits of his circle gathered here, he really does, in the words of curator Richard Ormond, "‘get’ whatever and whoever he’s painting. He really goes for it and brings them to life."

Because these portraits reflect Singer Sargent’s own tastes, there are plenty of deliciously witty and off-beat moments, like Robert Louis Stephenson twiddling his moustache or W Graham Robertson’s poodle threatening to steal the show despite the subject's dandified appearance.

Quite a few dandies stand out in this parade of artistes. Indeed, one of the best is a doctor, Samuel-Jean Pozzi. Apart from laying claim to the sobriquet "the father of modern French gynaecology", the handsome Dr Pozzi, wearing a flame red gown and golden slippers, founded the League of the Rose, a society devoted to the confession and acting out of sexual experiences.

Sargent's Circle was evidently wide and progressive, and the full-length portrait is one of several wonderful studies of languid bohemia. But a room dedicated to Sargent’s time spent with the artistic circle in rural Broadway in Worcestershire reveals his ability to capture natural scenes of human activity both indoors and out.

Family conversation pieces such as The Birthday Party (1885) and A Dinner Table at Night (1884) are both wonderful, almost Degas-like studies, without artifice.     

The central showpiece, however, is a room full of penetrating gazes, featuring a delicious face-off between three divas of the period. 

La Camencita (1890), the Spanish Gypsy dancer who performed all over Europe, is full of the imperious defiance of the flamenco, while the Irish-American Shakespearean actress Ada Rehan (1894-5) projects something more collected and kindly.

But Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889), placing the crown on her head after the murder of Duncan, wins out for her flame red locks, green robes and the wildness in the eyes.

With Sargent it’s always been the eyes that have it; there’s the kindly yet mercurial glint from Robert Louis Stevenson (1887) as the author reclines like a large cat in a wicker chair, or the soulful, cavernous gaze (enhanced by thick eyebrows) in the dark brown eyes of American actor Edwin Booth (1890).

The gaze of Henry James (1913), by contrast, seems more circumspect in a portrait that outgoing NPG Director Sandy Nairne admits to having a "daily conversation" with.

The pencil sketches that sit between these characters are similarly full of life. There’s an animated sketch of the composer and Suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth (1901) and a charming charcoal of the dashing young Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.

Little wonder that when Sargent gave up portraiture in 1907, society was horrified.   

For those of us not quite so au fait with the Singer Sargent story, the resulting landscapes come as a bit of a revelation - full as they are of impressionistic vigour and the kind of Cote d’Azur light (although in truth they were painted all over the continent) that makes the gallery sparkle with the fizz of the fin de siècle. 

Of course, Singer Sargent had form for this kind of thing - not only going back to his Salon days in Paris during the 1880s, when he was exposed to all the 'isms' then flourishing in the French capital, but also in signature works such as Paul Helleu sketching with his Wife (1889) and the iconic Carnation, Liliy, Lily Rose (1885 -6).

The latter is an Aesthetic-era classic and one of those important paintings that seems to absorb the influence of Pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionists - no doubt inspired by Sargent’s visit to Monet’s gardens at Giverny.

But in the later landscapes there is even more freedom. Granted, many of them still exhibit Sargent’s bohemian friends, but rather than the smoke of the Victorian drawing room, or the studio interior, the light of the continent emanates from them like a breath of fresh air.

Singer Sargent may have been the best portraitist in an era renowned for its portraits, but these free and energetic studies seem like the perfect coda to an artistic life well lived.

• Open 10am-6pm (9pm Thursday and Friday). Tickets £12-£16 (free for under-12s, family ticket £25-£35). Book online. Follow the gallery on Twitter @npglondon and use the hashtag #NPGSargent.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk//art/painting-and-drawing/art517105-john-singer-sargent-an-artistic-life-well-lived-at-the-national-portrait-gallery