John Singer Sargent: American in Paris Lands at the Met

John Singer Sargent, the renowned American expatriate painter, is being celebrated at The Met Fifth Avenue 100 years after his death with a sweeping exhibition of some 100 works produced during a formative decade in Paris, beginning in 1874 when he was just 18.

The show, “Sargent and Paris,” is a collaboration with the Musée D’Orsay and is the first devoted to the art the painter produced while based in France.

“What this exhibition shows is John Singer Sargent on the one hand at the beginning of his career, but already in a phase where he basically did probably some of his boldest paintings,” said Max Hollein, CEO and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during a press preview.

A string of rooms in the Tisch Galleries, awash in brilliant drawings, watercolors, and paintings by the young artist, leads up to the main attraction, a context-laden showcase of “Madame X” (1883-84), Sargent’s risqué portrait of American-in-Paris socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, originally with a fallen shoulder strap.

Sargent sold it to the Met in 1916. “I suppose it’s the best thing I’ve done,” he wrote in a letter to the museum’s director about the provocative piece, which sparked outrage at the Paris Salon in 1884 but was nonetheless a “scandalous success,” said Stephanie L. Herdrich, the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Drawings. Sargent was 28 years old at the time.

Determined to make it big in the art world once he arrived in the cultural capital, the highly motivated Sargent trained at the acclaimed École des Beaux-Arts before joining the studio of buzzy portrait painter Carolus-Duran. Duran was famous for exhorting his students to study Diego Velázquez—“Velázquez, Velázquez, Velázquez, relentlessly study Velázquez!”—which Sargent took to heart. He went to Madrid after completion of his training in Paris and registered as a copyist at the Prado, replicating some nine works by the Spanish master.

His 1879 copy of Velázquez’s iconic “Las Meninas,” a scene with the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain and her attendants, is presented in the Met show in tandem with his enigmatic portrait “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” from 1882. The picture of the children of American expat friends illustrates the lessons he learned from Velázquez about composition, light and shadow, and more.

Sargent, who was born in 1856 and died in 1925, traded off his talent and cosmopolitan background (he had traveled widely in Europe with his family during his childhood), and used them to connect with the right people in Paris—artists, writers, and patrons who could advance his cause. He was arguably as gifted a networker as he was a painter, and it paid off, leading to important commissions and acceptance of his works at the Paris Salon, which made him famous. He hobnobbed with a vast array of influencers, in today’s parlance, including Impressionist Claude Monet, whom he painted near his home in Giverny and who had a profound effect on his style. (See “Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood,” 1885.)

“Paris was at the epicenter of not only artistic appreciation, artistic production, but also artistic exchange, and Sargent was in the middle of it,” Hollein said. “So this exhibition celebrates Sargent’s time in Paris, and how he used Paris as a point to travel throughout Europe, to take in other influences, and to document all of that.”

Indeed, some of the most arresting pieces were inspired by trips abroad to Spain, Morocco, and Italy, where Sargent sought out unusual, exotic subjects to set himself apart and “appeal to international audiences,” Herdrich noted in her remarks. As seen here, he had his own peculiar take on Venice, mostly eschewing tourist spots for darkened interiors and side streets featuring local people.

The artist is widely known for his mastery of white-on-white painting. In a section devoted to his travel works, visitors can see “Smoke of Ambergris,” set in Tangier, Morocco, where he rented a house for two months in 1880. It’s a mysterious scene of Sargent’s own making, a pure fantasy of a woman perfuming herself with the scent of ambergris, incense derived from sperm whales.

He finished the piece in Paris, using a model. For him, the painting was “all about color,” the wall text states, with patterned carpets, tiles and a silvery incense burner offsetting luminous white fabric and architecture.

In this defining period of his career, Sargent “created increasingly ambitious portraits and genre scenes that pushed the boundaries of convention,” the curator said. “He came of age as an artist in an era of increasing social mobility. As Paris’s social structure shifted rapidly in the 1870s and ’80s, he found clients eager to embrace the power of self-presentation through portraiture to secure their position in society.”

The parade of prominent figures powerfully rendered by the 20-something wunderkind underscores “a special quality to Sargent’s early work,” Herdrich continued, “a unique confluence of his artistic ambition, knowledge, and talent with his bold innocence.”

Though he left Paris for London in 1885, he always carried it with him. He harnessed “the skills, lessons, and relationships he gained there . . . throughout his life,” the curator said, concluding, “In 1887, he confessed to Claude Monet, ‘I really do not want to be forgotten in Paris,’ and I hope this exhibition will secure that legacy.”

Sargent and Paris at The Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Ave., through Aug. 3, 2025. https://www.metmuseum.org/