Word: sargent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...born in Florence, the son of intensely Europhile parents (his father was a New England doctor, his mother a clinging neurasthenic who couldn't bear the crude culture of her birthplace). The Sargents were not rich, but they moved from one roost to another--Rome, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, the Austrian Tyrol--for the first 18 years of their son's life. All he retained of America was his passport and some traces of accent; yet he held onto both until his death. Sargent's relation to America was neither resentful nor yearning, as it is with so many expatriates...
...1870s, at the teaching atelier of Emile Carolus-Duran. Very much the maestro and dandy, Carolus-Duran focused his method on a near monomaniac attention to direct tonal painting, almost the opposite of color-based Impressionism. "Velazquez, Velazquez, Velazquez," he intoned, "ceaselessly study Velazquez." And from that study, Sargent got three of the major traits of his style. The first was a consummate skill in rendering objects and people bathed in space and low light. The second was its apparent straightforwardness--its ability to make a gesture count, to "knock in" the folds of a black dress or the petals...
...lessons of Velazquez's Las Meninas, which Sargent had copied in the Prado, sank very deep into his style and would produce curious effects tinged with melancholy, like the brilliant early portrait of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit--four slightly alienated-looking moppets, their white pinafores gleaming in a cavern of bourgeois shadow...
...1870s Sargent was shaping up for a glittering Parisian career. It was not to last. The curators of the National Gallery show, Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, have wittily duplicated the hanging of two portraits that, seen at the Paris Salon of 1884, caused a ruckus that precipitated Sargent's departure from France to England. One is his image of a pushy American social locomotive, Virginie Gautreau, all twisting, mannered pose and lunar, greenish-white skin, identified only as Madame X. The French critics and public hated it--and her. The other is a painting of a fashionable gynecologist named...
England made his fortune. He was what the English upper classes--both hereditary aristocrats and nouveau riche --had wanted but not found: a portraitist who could perform in the Grand Manner. There had been none since the death of Thomas Gainsborough a century before, and Sargent, with his tremendous fluency and genuine empathy for the social levels of his sitters, filled the gap to perfection. He had no interest in politics past or present, was completely without class resentment and seemed to be devoid of irony. As a biographer who knew him pointed out, "He would have been puzzled...