Boston exhibit reveals John Singer Sargent's methods and why his work remains relevant

The great painter John Singer Sargent, an American expat, is the subject of a new show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, its only US location before moving to London. It reveals much about his methods and why his work remains relevant more than 100 years later. Special correspondent Jared Bowen of GBH Boston reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas. Painter John Singer Sargent had a way, a way of rendering the architecture of an arm, a splaying of the fingers or an elevation of the chin so that we could know exactly what he saw inside and out. There's some people who recalled that they saw a little bit too much and that was a little bit nervous-making to go sit for Sargent. Sargent was an American artist who became the darling painter of the upper classes on both sides of the Atlantic from the late 1800s through the turn of the century. His sitters had noble lineages and cascading jewels and paid six figures and today's money for the privilege of being painted by him. He decided how they were going to pose, what they would wear in many cases and the backdrop and setting. Erica Hirschler is the curator of Fashioned by Sargent, a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston that follows the threads of Sargent's process. Even reuniting portraits with the original garments his sitters wore like this opera cloak enveloping Lady Sassoon. He takes it and he pulls it across her body and he turns out the lapel so that you get this great swoop of a pink satin across her body and it makes for a much more interesting painting. While the society portraits may have been Sargent's bread and butter, his true nourishment came from society's fringes. He relished painting bohemian poets, playwrights and musicians and here Sargent was as drawn to Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth as he was to her costume. The costume is covered with beetle wings which reflect the light and sort of shimmer blue-green and the excitement of being able to paint something that was so unusual appealed to him. I think there's a lot of Sargent's biography lurking in these paintings. Paul Fisher is a Wellesley College American Studies professor and author of the recent Sargent biography, The Grand Affair. Far from the gilded age drawing rooms, he says the painter was also drawn to the transgressors and had the daring to paint them and all at a time not unlike today when society was publicly wrestling with gender fluidity. Newspapers of the time often described this as the maladie du siècle, the illness of the century. Women were out and about. Men were seen as more complicated, maybe more effete. So there was a lot of anxiety and Sargent capitalizes on that. He did it boldly in this portrait of a well-known Parisian, the gynecologist Dr. Posey. For its startling intimacy, the painting was never shown publicly in Paris in Sargent's lifetime. He's wearing a blood red robe and he's got cuffs and collar that are highly pleated and somewhat feminine. So Sargent is really sporting with gender here. Dr. Posey was a famous womanizer but he had lots of queer friends in the circles in Paris and Sargent was kind of gripped by this man's charisma and you can see it in the portrait. He has warring instincts. On the one hand, he's a very sort of shy, quiet, retiring man who loves his work. On the other hand, the provocation is part of his making a career for himself. But provocation doesn't even begin to describe what Sargent did in 1884 when this portrait of the American born Madame Pierre Gautreau was exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon. She did not commission Sargent. Rather, he chased her. Everybody in Paris wanted to make an image of Madame Gautreau. One other American artist described her as black as spades and white as milk and she sort of glided across the floor. But when the portrait was unveiled with Gautreau's revealing gown, one strap originally painted slipping down her shoulder and her skin so white it looked lavender, society revolted. One of Sargent's friends wrote that it was surrounded by shoals of jibing women and also in the press, they say that it looks like her dress is about to fall down. They say that she looks like a corpse. She's so pale. Gautreau was mortified and Sargent was singed. He later repainted the strap and found the experience bruising enough to leave Paris for London. Sargent, when he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1915, said, I think it's one of the best things I've ever done. It's interesting. She sort of retreated from society, but then some years later had another portraitist painter portrait also in profile, also with one strap down. And validating John Singer Sargent as both socially and fashion forward. For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jared Bowen in Boston.