John Singer Sargent was only 18 years old when he arrived in Paris in 1874. In the decade that followed, he would not only launch his career as a painter, exhibiting and gaining distinctions to several salonsBut also embarked on trips that would definitively inflammate his practice and establish the links that would finance his work, including worldly, athletes and superior crust financiers; Writers like Henry James; And artists like Monet, Renoir and Rodin. Portraits of and by many of these personalities are in sight Sargent and Paris at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, what goes most strongly in this exhibition is his humanist curvature: the loved one of Sargent, and it shows.
The structure of the exhibition is quite simple, even a little basic, with section titles like “In the studio”, “Beyond the Studio” and “Fascining Portraits”, but the works speak for themselves. The first two sections focus on Sargent's education, especially under the French portrait painter Carroredas well as its trips to Europe and North Africa. Even in these first years of adulthood, the characteristics of his talent begin to show. Although his copies and his academic drawings, such as “dance fauna, after the ancient” (1873-1874) are stiff, missing this living spark, paintings as “a male model in front of a stove” (c. 1875-1880) are permeated with human specificity. The body of the model is unidelined, with protruding ribs and a slight bodybag; He looks at the ground, as if he were at the bottom of thought. In particular, Sargent depicts the screen behind which the model has changed as well as the stove that he used to stay warm, stressing that it is a real person in the world, a quality that persists in subsequent portraits.
Indeed, it is by painting people that Sargent really shines, and he also makes them shine. They are almost always represented asymmetrically and captured in the middle of the movement, as if to emphasize that they exceed the limits of the frame. For example, “portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts” (1877), which marked its public debut when it was shown at the Paris Salon, seems to capture this family friend moving on her seat, the buttons of her dress winding windingly around her body. “The sulfur match” (1882) is a moralization genre paintIn this case, a warning against the dangers of alcohol consumption, but the tender specificity of figures – the feet of the woman perched on a precarious tilted chair, kept in a delicate balance by her fingers only – transcends her container.
For Sargent, life is in his hands, and it makes them better than anyone. See, for example, the striker “Dr. Pozzi at home ”(1881), coated in a magnificent red. His right index finger and her thumb closed his clothing while the other three fingers escape vigorously on his chest; Two fingers of his other hand hang on a string to his hip. One of the hands of Madame Ramón Subcaseaux in her seizure of Portrait of 1880 at the post of her chair, her index finger bent as if his buffer felt her polished surface; The other is ready with casualness against the frame of a piano, his fingers about to slide the keys. Here, as in all the portraits of High Society of Sargent, its guards are surrounded by the external signs of their wealth, but not trapped or even overwhelmed by them, as in many other paintings showing wealth, like those by Thomas Gainsborough Or Anthony Van Dyck. The piano of Madame Subercaseaux is only interesting insofar as it is scaffolding for its elegance, just like this thin silk and this golden ring.
Sargent also extends this grace to children, capturing the particular way they watch, not yet learned that it is rude. “Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron” (1880) is a particularly striking example-he apparently clashed with Marie-Louise, then 11 years old, on his clothes and poses through so-called 83 sessions, and his heady personality manifests itself in his lively gaze. His brother's right arm is reversed, his hand resting on his back – a privileged position for Sargent, it seems – natural for his innature. In all these portraits, the guards' hands highlight their agitation – these people are not trapped in this context forever; They are here for a minute or two before returning to their own occupied and interesting life.
This show rightly ends with “Madame X” – perhaps the biggest work in Sargent's career and an icon in the MET collection – like the controversy which was born from its projection at the Paris Salon in 1884 can have partly encouraged to leave the city. The background is an undifferentiated tan. The subject has no jewelry, and the coffee table by his side is only used to support his alabaster arm, which brings you to this elegant neck without frills in this proud and almost imperative profile. Here is a shameless woman in her beauty, a woman who knows that her portrait deserves to be painted. This is what Sargent captured in his paintings: this beautiful feature of each of us.
Sargent and Paris Continue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) until August 3, and will go to the Musée d'Orsay (Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Paris, France) from September 23 to January 11, 2026. The exhibition was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Musée d'Orsay. He was organized by Stephanie L. Herdrich, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons and Paul Perrin, with Caroline Elenowitz-Hess.
The complementary exhibition Emily Sargent: Portrait of a family will be exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from July 1 to March 8, 2026.
