John Singer Sargent

I was chatting with my friend Brienne recently, and she alerted me to an exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that she thought I would like.  It featured paintings by John Singer Sargent, mostly portraits, but with a particular focus:  how clothing and fabrics were an important theme in his art and how he rendered them in paint.  I have been to several exhibits of different types with Brienne, so she knows my tastes and interests somewhat, but she really hit the nail on the head.  (Is there a similar sewing or clothing related metaphor I could have used?)

For years now, it has been a particular interest of mine how artists render fabrics in various media such as oil painting and stone sculpture.  Winged Victory, for instance, is my favorite sculpture at the Louvre, mostly due to how the fabrics draping the figure evoke a dynamism that I would not associate with stone or imagine could have been achieved in stone.  On a recent trip to the Louvre, I saw a vestment worn by the Archbishop of Paris at Napoleon's coronation and had to seek out the monumental painting of the coronation, also at the Louvre, to compare the actual vestment to the painting.  I often take photos of details from paintings focusing on the folds of fabric, the shadows they make, and how the texture is achieved.  Here are some links to previous posts of mine on that topic:

https://pariswiththeellisons.blogspot.com/2018/02/clothes-at-louvre.html

https://pariswiththeellisons.blogspot.com/2018/08/last-weekend.html

https://pariswiththeellisons.blogspot.com/2018/05/delacroix.html

In the second post linked above, I even comment on an example of fabric rendered in fabric--a tapestry depicting elaborate robes.  

This is all to say that I was dying to get to the MFA exhibit.  It is closing soon, so my only chance was to catch it while we were back for Christmas.  Unfortunately, Brienne was out of town and could not join me, but I caught my friend Clara for a couple of hours before she left for New York.  I was not disappointed.  It was a thoughtful, interesting, deeply-researched, informative exhibit, and I got the bonus of spending a bit of time with Clara!

One of most interesting aspects of the exhibit was that they had tracked down some of the actual pieces of clothing that Sargent's sitters had worn, such as the example below.

The comparisons were interesting, both because we could see how Sargent captured various elements of the clothing with paint, but also because we could see what he chose to alter.  Below is a dress whose color he changed pretty significantly.

Here is (part of) a beautiful portrait exhibited alongside similar fabrics from the MFA's collection, although not the precise ones that Sargent was depicting.

And here are a few more of my favorite paintings from the exhibit, all in shades of white, which he favored near the end of his career.

Unlike some of the Renaissance paintings I have photographed at the Louvre, or even Delacroix, Sargent's brushstrokes are bolder, simpler.  But I think that the overall impression he provides of the fabrics is beautiful and evocative.  The huge range of colors he uses to paint a "white" garment is stunning--browns, blacks, purples, pinks, grays.

The exhibit is closing at the MFA in a couple of weeks and will be moving to the Tate in London after that.  We'll see if I happen to be in London during its run there ...