The painter John Singer Sargent has sometimes been dismissed as an artist of flattery and frivolity — a portraitist-for-hire who catered to the vanities of his elite subjects, whether they were British aristocrats or Boston Brahmins.
Often, these criticisms have centered on fashion: The writer D.H. Lawrence once ridiculed Sargent’s works as “nothing but yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops, with some pretty head propped up on the top.”The exhibition “Fashioned by Sargent,” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which travels to Tate Britain early next year, skillfully parries these jabs with some 50 canvases in which style and substance are deeply intertwined.
This is a show to win over even the most hard-boiled Sargent skeptics, turning a purported weakness — the artist’s obsessive attention to his subjects’ attire, expressed through both of-the-moment outfit choices and fabric-flaunting brushwork — into a strength.
And yes, there are clothes — magnificent examples of couture and costuming, including some of the exact pieces worn in the paintings.
Anyone partial to Julian Fellowes dramas will find, in time for the second season of “The Gilded Age,” ballroom-hushing silk and velvet dresses by the House of Worth and requisite accessories from Chantilly lace fans to the feathery swoosh of a hat ornament known as an aigrette.
Persons:
John Singer Sargent, D.H, Lawrence, Sargent’s, Sargent, ”, Julian Fellowes
Organizations:
Boston Brahmins, Museum of Fine Arts, Tate Britain, House
Locations:
Boston, Chantilly