Sargentology – New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent

In 1910Walter Sickert penned an article titled ‘Sargentolatry’ that addressed the fervour surrounding John Singer Sargent as an artist and tastemaker. Using the language of religious devotion, Sickert writes of the ‘prostration before [Sargent] and all his works’ by the British art press, the effect this adulation had on other artists working in this period, and how this sense of complacency was bad for both critics and artists alike. While Sickert’s criticisms can certainly be placed within modernism’s early antagonism to and rejection of Victorianism – an imperialistic golden age that Sargent was seen to represent – it marked the beginning of a line of debasement that would continue well after his death in 1925. Echoing Sickert’s sentiments as to the vapidity of the blindworship of Sargent, in his Transformations of 1926 Roger Fry decided simply that ‘it seems to me he brings no new or individual insight to the interpretation even of social values. Here he moves, and it is one secret of his effect, quite naturally in step with the crowd’. Though talented, Sargent was ultimately considered a relic. Thus, at the start of the twentieth century, it would appear that Sargent would be relegated to history as an artist with nothing new or important to say to the generations of artists that succeeded him. What Sickert and Fry could not foresee, perhaps, was the complexity of an artist whose person and work pervaded nearly every aspect of the late Victorian world – from music to literature to theatre, Europe to the East, Aestheticism to the First World War. Unable to erase the ‘Sargentolatry’, and the titanesque figure that Sargent represented, later scholars often misidentified, or possibly even corrected, Sickert’s term into ‘Sargentology’, a move that attempted to wash away the dogmatic tinge of the original by focusing instead on a more impartial, almost scientific study of Sargent as a distinct entity within the history of art. Though he brought seemingly ‘no new insight’, he was worthy enough to become a movement within himself. Towards the later years of the twentieth century, however, Sargent studies began to reach a new crescendo as renewed interest in Victorian art began to emerge. The Sargent catalogue raisonné by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, which began in the early 1990s, solved the everpresent problem of coming to terms with the quantity of Sargent’s work, but much was still to be done to interpret its significance. Recent blockbuster exhibitions – such as the recent Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery (2015) and Sargent: The Watercolours at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2017) – represent just this type