John Singer Sargent, Interior Designer
Stephanie L. Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture The American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art
John Singer Sargent in his studio in Paris, ca. 1884.Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art.
John Singer Sargent, The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and Mrs. Tennant, 1899, Oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, 1927 Wolfe Fund, 1927
John Singer Sargent, An Artist in His Studio, ca. 1904, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden Fund, 1905
In a photo of John Singer Sargent in his Paris studio from 1884, the 28-year-old painter presents himself as a sophisticated, stylish bohemian whose eclectic taste is reflected in his carefully chosen decor. Surrounded by objets d’art, paintings, and refined textiles, he displays his good taste and worldliness for potential portrait patrons, creating settings to suit his sitters.
Born in Italy to American expatriate parents, Sargent cultivated his powers of observation during a peripatetic childhood in Europe where he was constantly exposed to new people and the great art and culture of the continent. Fluent in a number of languages and cultures, he intuitively understood his patrons’ aspirations and ambitions, employing his dazzling, painterly technique to become one of the most sought-after portraitists of Gilded Age America and Victorian and Edwardian England.
During the 1890s, he achieved success as a portraitist in England by catering to a new upwardly mobile clientele. For Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, a fashionable society hostess and wife of a London banker, he fabricated an opulent setting in his studio that reflected his patron’s style and taste—using props from his own collection. The Louis XVI–style upholstered settee with gilt framework and the pale Aubusson carpet reflect the vogue for French 18th-century design in England at the time. Cascading swags of lush drapery in the background evoke paintings by old masters such as Van Dyke or Gainsborough. This stylish scene references Sargent’s artistic heritage and conveys status to the sitter, while the subdued tones serve as a foil for her daring vivid fuchsia velvet dress and vivacious pose.
The Wyndham Sisters, painted a few years later, is a dazzling display of fin-de-siècle opulence enhanced by Sargent's bravura painting technique. Sargent depicted three elegant sisters—daughters of politician and wealthy Londoner Percy Wyndham and his wife—in the grand drawing room of their refined home at Belgrave Square. In their element, the glamorous women appear impossibly graceful with their attenuated figures, long necks, and slender arms. Wearing white dresses, they are arranged across the lavish upholstered sofa, just like the strategically placed magnolia blossoms that decorate the room. Frozen in time by Sargent, the sisters become part of the decor. Within the darkened interior, flashes of light illuminate details of the well-appointed room, including the gilt frames of their art collection.
As contemporary critics celebrated Sargent’s ability to capture the “exact cachet of fashionable life,” and suggested that his paintings were “perfect records of the style and manners of a particular period,” he grew weary of the demands of portrait painting. After 1900, he increasingly declined portrait commissions in favor of traveling to picturesque locals in Italy and Spain where he could indulge his passion for painting out-of-doors. While An Artist in His Studio is a depiction of a dear friend, Italian artist Ambrogio Raffele, it contains elements of self-portraiture. Raffele is shown painting a landscape in a cramped room in Northern Italy. The title is a witty commentary on Sargent’s own life in this period: The “studio” is, in fact, a bedroom, likely a hotel room. The tools of his trade are scattered about the tiny space—the canvas is propped haphazardly, and preliminary sketches are strewn across the unmade bed. Sargent delights in rendering dazzling sunlight on the rumpled white sheets. This intimate composition, a far cry from the splendid decor of society clients, reveals personal details about how Sargent lived and created his art after 1900 far from the portrait studio and the elegant interiors of his patrons.
Stephanie L. Herdrich is assistant curator of American painting and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She was co-curator of Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (2015) and Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River (2015) and is coauthor of American Drawings and Watercolors in The Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent (2000). Her most recent book is Sargent: The Masterworks (2018). She attended Washington University in St. Louis and received a PhD and a certificate in curatorial studies from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.