REVIEW | Sargent and Fashion – Tate Britain

I thought I’d have more thoughts about Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain, but it turns out I don’t have much to say.

This was a fun exhibition that gathered a spectacular array of John Singer Sargent’s portraits alongside several examples of the actual clothes that his sitters wore, such as Ellen Terry’s beetle wing dress in her role as Lady Macbeth. It really demonstrated Sargent’s adeptness with handling paint and the myriad visual effects that could be created. The portrait of Ena Wertheimer also showcased his exquisite command of monochrome palettes.

Additionally, it was an incredibly rare opportunity to view both versions of Madame X together.

I also felt the show managed to challenge common ideas of what a high society Sargent portrait typically looks like. A section towards the end revealed that some portraits had close parallels with Old Masters like Diego Velázquez and Peter Lely, as well as Anthony van Dyck. Yet something like the portrait of Mrs Frank Millet (Elizabeth Merrill) offers an unusual approachability reminiscent of those by Berthe Morisot.

Particular underrated was a section devoted to the Kashmiri shawl, the sole survivor of several that Sargent owned, which is joined by an entire wall of paintings featuring such garments. The role of props in Sargent’s portraiture is a major theme throughout the show.

The most interesting work for me, personally, was In a Garden, Corfu (1909), depicting fellow painter Jane de Glehn reading in the garden of the Villa Soteriotisa. She is accompanied by two women on either side who are in fact the same person, Eliza Wedgewood. So the composition is actually a fiction. What drew me most to this painting, however, was the way paint layers for background elements overlapped with the foreground ones in his process to reduce the forms of things like vases. This is particularly noticeable on the right hand side of the painting. As a result, the whole thing starts to feel like an experimental oil sketch, which is massively different to his other pictures.