Sargent and Fashion: Audio

My name is Richard Ormond. I have been a scholar of Sargent for close to 50 years. I'm the co-author of the John Singer Sargent catalogue raisonné of oils and watercolours, and I'm also a great nephew of the artist. So I've been at Sargent for many years, writing and researching and organising exhibitions.

This is a picture of Lady Sassoon, who was the mother of Philip and Sybil, who were two of Sargent's closest friends. She was a Rothschild, a French Rothschild, a very striking woman with a great hat. And she's depicted here in a black opera cloak encasing her with a red... well, rather a pink lining. What I think is extraordinary about the picture is the way that Sargent has clearly pinned the pink lining back to create this great sinuous line running through the black, and it's so poignant. It's almost as if she's baring her flesh. She's a super refined woman. And that, I think, says a lot about how Sargent manipulates fashion. He manipulates costume to create the artistic effects he wants to get. And this is a really striking, it's a very imposing, marvellous portrait of this grand Rothschild. And yet at the same time, this marvellous, really breathtaking, I think, piece of artistry.

He'll take a white dress and he'll play with all manner. It's almost as if everything that’s white is not white. It's a white dress, but nothing is white about it. And here in this black opera cloak, which hangs magnificently around this woman... Because of the tones and the shadows, it's all manner of different blacks in there. There's no straightforward black at all. And just the same as he does with a white dress.

We also have the original dress or opera cloak that Lady Sassoon is wearing. So it's quite exceptional, that you can look at the picture and then you can actually see the real opera cloak. I think that's one of the things about this exhibition. It's about fashion and not just about art.

You can see the splendour of the costume and you can see how Sargent has recreated it. But of course, what you don't get is the feeling of... she’s standing there. And she's partly turned and has one hand down and the other hand across. So there's a kind of movement in the picture that ...it's a static dress, you can't get that feeling of the vitality of Lady Sassoon. And that wistful face, that rather pale, refined, wistful face that's also bringing out that character.

Hi, I'm Doctor Kimathi Donkor, artist and academic. So we're looking at two paintings, Madame X, and next to it is a Study of Virginie Gautreau, born Avenue. The contrast in colour, and Sargent's use of black are very prominent in his practise, and particularly in this painting. It's a very rich, deep black. And what's particularly striking specifically around the décolletage, the sort of breast area, is how pale Virginie's skin is made, and it's almost a sort of bluish, kind of colour.

And so I think the use of the black dress, aside from other fashionable connotations, is very much intended to create this sharp contrast and to sort of bring out to highlight the paleness of the skin, which is a technique which European or North American painters have used for many centuries, sort of using dark backgrounds or dark clothing to sort of accentuate the paleness of the sitter's skin colour.

So it was certainly something which was a conversation, a talking point around artistic and aesthetic circles. Some of the criticism was around the sort of colouration and feeling that, you know, it was too pale, that maybe he'd made her look sort of deathly rather than vivacious.

I was interested in this painting as part of a research project I was doing called Africana Unmasked. The idea of this is to create artworks related to existing artworks, and those existing artworks would have some kind of connection to the African diaspora, African peoples, African culture in its widest sense. But which... that's not available, that's not visible in the artwork itself. And this is particularly true in the case of Madame X, Virginie Gautreau. You would never know from looking at the painting, or you might guess but... she came from a very sort of prominent, Louisiana slave-holding, plantation-owning family. And so in that sense, her existence and, but particularly her wealth and her social position was sort of very much the result of the history of her family’s exploitation and oppression of enslaved African people in the deep south of the United States.

It's also information which is generally not made known in the captions of the two museums which hold these two pieces, or even in most of the sort of catalogues and studies of the painting. It seemed to me that there was something a bit insidious about that. And it also struck me that there was something about the whiteness of the sitter and the use of the contrast with black, which obviously had a very powerful metaphorical and symbolic relationship to this sort of history of enslavement. I don't think that it was intended to be referenced by Sargent or Gautreau, but I do believe that they were both sort of engaged with an ideology of whiteness which holds racial purity or white purity of European peoples to be a value in itself and a marker of sort of civilisation and superiority. Bearing in mind that we're thinking about an age of empire, an age of segregation where racial theory was highly prevalent throughout sort of Western society.

As a person of African heritage myself, I have quite a strong emotional and psychological connection with the history of enslavement and colonialism. And so when I enter into museum spaces, especially when it's dealing with, you know, work at the height of that era – we're talking about the 19th, well, anything from, you know, the 16th through to the 20th century, really – I am actually always very, alert to the possibilities which surround any given artwork in terms of its relationship to colonialism and imperialism. So I decided that I was going to make a painting which would be, if you like, an answer across the century that divides me and Sargent, a painting which is a similar sort of scale and size to his painting, of an African heroine called Yaa Asantewaa, where she has exactly the same sort of pose and similar sort of dress, but more related to the Ghanaian sort of dress style.

There is a direct comparison between the royal lineage of Yaa Asantewaa in my painting and the sort of confederate aristocracy of which Virginia Gautreau was a part. I suppose that was a way of, if you like, somehow trying to answer back, to speak to this art history of the West from the position of being an artist of now and of African heritage. You could call it a form of critique, but also a form a celebration of Black agency and sort of Black selfhood.

So it’s quite a performance sitting to Sargent. It was quite an intense experience for both parties. Sargent was the director of the portrait. He chose the costumes, he chose the setting, he chose the pose, but at the same time, he expected the sitter to play their part. It was a dialogue.

He gets steamed up because he's so intent on getting the thing just right. And as he goes up and down, he stands back to look at the portrait and he steps forward to make the brush mark, then back. And it must have been quite intimidating for people to see this large man sort of coming down and muttering to himself, you know. ‘Humph. Demons.’ He's all steamed up, and then he'll break off to play the piano, to break the tension.

Most of the portraits were painted in Sargent's studio in Tite Street, Chelsea. When he was in America, obviously he had temporary studios. He painted people in his hotel room. But he sometimes went more ambitiously. And Mrs Fiske Warren, who was a poet and a society leader in Boston, she was posed in Isabella Stewart Gardner's – the famous Mrs. Gardner who founded the Gardner Museum. He painted her in this room full of extraordinary exotic objects in the background, the Gothic room. And there she is in the chair with her daughter beside her, and she's in a dazzling dress. The daughter, Rachel... Sargent sort of more or less threw a wrap around her, sort of a pink thing. He didn't bother about the dress. He's playing with costume, too. I mean, he's doing all sorts of things.

He's like a breath of fresh wind. So many of the artists of the period are very stagey, very conventional. And Sargent just has this breathtaking veracity, vitality. And so he's painting very often quite complex compositions, but infused with the light of modernity that it's a new, modern interpretation of more traditional formal compositions that he enlivens.

My name is Tom Crewe, and I'm a journalist and a novelist. I have a novel called The New Life, which is about London in the 1890s, about two men who decide to write a revolutionary book about homosexuality, arguing that it should not be a crime. And this initiative, this enterprise, gets wrapped up with the terrible trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, and my characters have to decide whether to try and change this public mood, this terrible public mood which has developed in response to the trial, or to bow down to it, to go into hiding. So Sargent is a figure that has always interested me as a great chronicler of Britain and London in the 1890s, providing a visual record of the society I’m interested in recording. So he's very much part of that milieu. And he was indeed friends with Oscar Wilde. There are certainly strong hints in his work and in his life and in his circle of friends that he might have been gay, or he was gay. As a painter with, we think, a hidden life and ambiguous sexuality he's right at the centre of this story.

The phrase ‘wonderful possibilities’ comes from Graham Robertson, who is one of Sargent’s sitters. He's in this wonderful portrait behind me of the man in the slender overcoat hugging his form, with a nice cane and a poodle on the floor. And he was painted by Sargent at Sargent's studio in Tite Street, and made this reference to Oscar Wilde, who was in the house opposite or nearly opposite. And Wilde has created a beautiful home on Tite Street. Sargent had moved into the house of Whistler, so he was the second great painter to be operating out of this house on Tite Street. This idea that this was a street of wonderful possibilities, that this is a street full of artists and writers with a magnetism of its own. And Sargent, certainly by collecting these figures around him, bringing them into his home, into his studio, is expanding the glamour and glitter and possibility of the society Sargent was a part of.

One of the things that looking at these portraits, especially the portraits of men we suspect to have been gay or know to have been gay, is to reflect on the division between their public and private selves. The way in which so many of these men moved through public society, public life, acquired levels of fame and significance in their fields, and yet were living a secret, private, intimate life which was hidden from view. The portraits say, of W. Graham Robertson. Which is a very public portrait put on exhibition, but is potentially painted by a gay man of a gay man. And something like that really brings out the frisson between those two spheres. You are both out and in the closet. You are both on display and not on display. You might be known through the portrait to certain people who know the kind of person you really are. But other people might just think you're a man in a nice coat.

And that symbolises really a lot about Victorian society at this time and the way in which queer people lived. I think it is wrong to think of gay men, for example, as always locked in a room feeling sad and lonely. They were forced by the nature of existence to be out in the world. Most people didn't get into trouble with the law. They were not arrested. They found a way of accommodating themselves within their society. And that is something which we can take from these portraits. They are in the world still. They are not separated from the world. They are here.

Walford Graham Robertson was an artist, an illustrator. He was a theatre designer. He was in his late 20s at the time he was painted by Sargent. He was part of Oscar Wilde’s circle. He was, in fact, involved in one of Wilde's early publicity coups when he helped purchase some green carnations that several members of the audience, of Wilde's inner circle, wore at the opening night of Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892. So he plays a crucial part, actually, in the Wilde Story. He's known as W. Graham Robertson. And we have a letter from Wilde saying 'What do you allow your friends to call you, W or Graham? My friends call me Oscar', which is a very nice little thing.

Robertson would have been part of this crowd. And he's shown in the portrait wearing an overcoat, which is very figure-hugging, and he came for the sitting in the summer. It was much too warm to be wearing this coat, but Sargent insisted that the coat was the picture. The coat was the subject, so he made him wear it. And I think I'm right in saying that Robertson ended up taking off several layers of his clothing. So looking at the picture now, you can see he probably isn't wearing a waistcoat or jacket. He's probably just down to his shirt and tie under this coat, which therefore is hugging his body much more closely than would be normal.

He's elongated by the coat. He is very, very slender. Of course he’s got this wonderful cane with a jade head which again, sort of echoes the line of his body. And he does have this poodle, which I believe was called Mouton, just resting by the cane with a bow in its hair. So it's a very dandyish portrait. He looks very young. He looks younger than he actually was. If you look at photographs of him around the same time, he looks a little more haggard, but here he looks very fresh-faced. Very sophisticated. Really rather handsome, actually. And we do think he was probably gay. He never married. It's even suspected he might have been in a relationship with Kenneth Graham, who wrote The Wind in the Willows. It’s another clue, actually, to Sargent's own life and world.

There's some flexibility around the depiction of gender in portraiture, both for women and men. The level of theatricality that the portrait can sometimes offer allows a slight blurring or expansion or play with gender. And so it does offer that space for a different kind of persona projected than would be possible walking down the street, perhaps, or at a dinner party or at an evening do. Through that you might have had access to a more truthful version of that person that perhaps we see in the portrait of Robertson, a slightly camper, slightly more theatrical version of himself than he was used to displaying in public. And of course, then we have the paradox that this actually is the ultimate public display of self. And yet it's not at the same time. And that's something that portraiture can do.

I'm Tessa Murdoch, and I was born Tessa Meyer, and I am Adèle Meyer's great granddaughter. I'm sitting in front of this remarkable triple portrait of my great grandmother and her two children, Frank Cecil and Elsie Charlotte. So the little boy in the back of the portrait behind the French Louis XV settee is my grandfather, who, sadly, I never knew as he died, aged 49 from a riding accident in 1935. But when I first saw this painting, I identified with Frank’s sister behind him, who was 11, exactly my age when the painting was hung in our family home.

Adèle is wearing a spectacular iridescent pink ball gown, almost certainly acquired in Paris from Maison Worth. And in her left hand she's holding a chic French fan, probably Duvelleroy, which she would have bought in the same street in Paris as the dress. But surprising for Sargent on the settee is an open book, which she's obviously been reading. What is remarkable about Sargent's portrait of Adèle is that she was very small. Her sister reminds us that she had an 18-inch waist when she was a young adult, and Sargent has almost disguised her size by using the foreshortening of the footstool in the foreground on which her feet are balanced. The impression is of this extraordinary dress which disguises her real size.

Adèle's glamour belies the fact that she had been very well educated. She attended the London Collegiate School for girls, which was in Camden Town. The Family House was nearby. And then she went on to Bedford College. So when her children grew up, she made time to consider the role of women in society in the Edwardian age. And she was also responsible for her four younger siblings, who were orphaned after her parents died in quick succession in 1886 and 1888. So come the early 1900s, she had the time and inclination to devote herself to social work, which is how she described it.

She worked with Clementina Black, a published suffragist, to examine the working conditions of women in sweating workshops across London. So in a case next to the painting is a copy of Clementina Black and Adèle Meyer's book The Makers of Our Clothes, published in London in 1909, just at the time that the act was going through Parliament to address the need for a minimum wage. And it was reviewed in the Morning Post, who described it as ‘a vivid description of the grey underworld which lies beneath the glitter and movement of London life.’

What the book pinpoints is the difficulty of finding the appropriate women to interview. The two authoresses travelled by public transport, they walked the streets in order to try and find the appropriate workshops. They called on local vicars in order to get introductions and were amazed at how little local authorities knew about who lived where and how often the workers sort of moved on. They were migratory. And I think it forms an extraordinary contrast with the luxurious life that Carl and Adèle lived in Mayfair.

Intriguingly, people looking at the portrait are flabbergasted by the very long rope of pearls that stretches from Adèle's neck to right under her high-heeled shoes, which are posed on a stool in the foreground. 20 years later, Adele gave the largest pearl from her necklace for sale in aid of the Red Cross in December 1918. She set a trend for some 300 pearls that were given that were created into separate necklaces and sold in aid of the Red Cross. So embedded in the glamour of the portrait is this single pearl that becomes a seed for good works. You know, when she's really in her maturity.

Hi, my name is Suchitra Choudhury and I am a researcher affiliated with the University of Glasgow. I'm interested in the way in which Indian objects are portrayed in literature, mostly 19th-century literature. And among them, of course, the Indian shawl forms a prominent part. And this is really to do with my book, which came out in the last year. It's called Textile Orientalisms.

Shawls used to be very popular in India from, let's say, well... the 12th century itself. And it has continued to date. But what's different now is that during the late 18th or almost throughout the 19th century, it was largely a male garment. It was a male accessory that elite men wore. And they were also sent to Britain as diplomatic gifts. And these came through the East India officers who had to interact with Indian rulers and princes. And they would get those gifts and they would come to Britain with those gifts. Now, they were not always allowed to keep them, but the East India Company as a whole sometimes kept them. And they also sometimes would sell it publicly. So the cultural significance of the shawl goes in a variety of ways. It's seen as a gift. It's seen as a fashionable accessory for women. It's also seen as a wider metonym for the British-Indian relationship within the colonial period.

So when the shawls came to Britain, they were desired by wealthy women because they were colossally expensive. And this is one of the reasons why British manufacturers, textile manufacturers, let's say in Norwich, in Edinburgh and in Paisley in particular, they started imitating these Indian shawls. So these shawls, they were called ‘imitation Indian shawls’. They also came to be known very colloquially as Paisley shawls, which referred to the town – this is in Scotland – where these imitation shawls were being made. The term paisley pattern came to designate what we call the Buta or the Colca in Bengali, or the Keri in the Kashmir river’s language. So it's remarkable how, you know, the advent of the shawl in Britain really connected a variety of things.

As it has been mentioned in the museum text, the shawls are out of fashion actually by the time Sargent comes to paint them. There were several reasons why the shawls fell out of fashion. You know, they say that the Franco-Prussian War during 1870 to 1871 was one of the reasons. Another reason was that perhaps the imitation variety had really taken off so well that the original expensive Indian variety was not really adored anymore, it was no longer a class statement.

So many images of shawls in these paintings. But when we talk about shawls in Sargent, it is also important to remember how Sargent’s interest in music actually sometimes influences art. Looking at the shawl paintings, for example, I am just reminded how Ludwig Mingus's famous 1877 ballet opera La Bayadere had a famous shawl dance, and interesting that its arranger was Theophile Gautier, the famous music critic whose daughter Judith was a sitter for Sargent in 1885.

So we are looking at this lovely painting, very famous painting called Cashmere, it was painted around 1908. In this painting we see seven women and they're actually the same woman. The sitter is Reine Ormond, who was Sargent’s niece. And these women are walking forward, and only two of them are making eye contact with the viewer. This is fascinating because it seems to create a rhythm from the point of view of the viewer. At one point, a person is looking at you, then you have to stop that gaze and go on to the second who's actually turned her face. And that's how it works. And I think that rhythm that keeps you alert and makes you sort of watch it more closely, and it also definitely holds your attention.

We’re coming from a context of 19th-century culture of shawls. And of course, being an Indian, this is remarkable because it looks like a catwalk, if I can say. They're wearing the same material, the shawl, the paisley-patterned shawl. So I'm actually not convinced it's a cashmere shawl because the texture of it would have been sort of lighter and more clingy. I mean, it's not the legendary cashmere shawl we talk about, because that would just cling to your body rather than give a very sort of pointed or quite prominent folds.

Sargent lived in France, so where he would have those imitation shawls, they were made in Lyon and they were called Lyon shawls. So if they were imitation, obviously the folds were going to be different and slightly more prominent. And that for a painter might have been attractive, at least with what he had in mind.

And as an Indian, I find it very interesting. Women in India when they're bereaved of their husbands, they wear were black and white, and this seems to me almost a procession of widows, you know. And again, the shawl has been compared to other materials, but the shawls here are actually being worn like a sari, if you like, you know, it's got folds in the front and it's got covers in their head. And this is also very different from Manet’s Olympia in which the cashmere is very fine. The lady, she’s lying on it and there are lots of... sort of theories about sexuality and commodification and things like that.

So we're looking at the painting The Chess Game, which was painted in 1907, in which we have a woman and another man playing chess. So this is very interesting because the clothes are not really what we are used to generally. The man, for instance, wears a şalvar, which is a loose kind of pantaloon, and the woman wears a shawl. It's not very clear, but it helps with the play of light, I believe. I mean, we can't call it an authentic picture, but it's more likely that it's a scene of cultural mimicking. And it is a very highly posed picture, in my view, even though there's a natural background.

So chess itself has some sort of Oriental connection. It was it was invented in India in the sixth century. And even though that, you know, long history may not be important, there is a very strong Oriental connection with the game of chess, and it's got modern variations as well. The Chess Players is also a name of a famous film by the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. I would say it's a cultural icon, almost. And people sometimes mistakenly call the chess game of this painting as a ‘chess player’.