John Singer Sargent and the fin de siècle Culture of Mauve

This article focuses on what Edwin Blashfield described as John Singer Sargent’s ‘predilection for aniline suggestions in colours’. This is particularly striking in the early oils of Sargent but also in the writings of some of his French literary acquaintances, from Robert de Montesquiou to Judith Gautier, who strangely described the painter’s works from his formative period in Paris and London using the new chromatic terminology and notably the colour description ‘mauve’ or its variants such as ‘lilac’ or ‘heliotrope’. It is this ‘culture of mauve’, to paraphrase Sabine Doran’s essay on the ‘culture of yellow’, as the subversive colour of modernity which I will attempt to unveil, in keeping with what Vernon Lee described as Sargent’s ‘curious’ francophilia.