I am unashamedly besotted with The Gilded Age, the sumptuous HBO costume drama set in New York in the last two decades of the 19th century. Conceived as the American equivalent of Downton Abbey by that astute arbiter of class distinctions, Julian Fellowes, it follows the deliciously snobby and social climbing lives of two families living on opposite sides of the same street on the Upper East Side of the city.
Agnes Van Rhijn and her sister, Ada Brook, occupy an unimpeachably respectable brownstone, with an English butler and set times for tea and visitors. The Russells dazzle in a newly built mansion with a chef who pretends to be French and a series of catty and manipulative maids. My favourite character is Oscar Van Rhijn, played by the British actor, Blake Ritson, with an acerbic wit and impeccable taste but with unfortunate fiscal judgment which has led to his mother’s social ruin by the end of the second season.
The true stars of the show however are the costumes. From the utterly jaw dropping creations worn by Bertha Russell, to the delightfully fresh and appealing dresses worn by Marion Brook, who has come to live with her aunts, Agnes and Ada, in New York. Ritson has said in an interview that before a scene is shot, the actors all stand around and admire what they are wearing. That could take a quite a while as each character’s clothes have been so meticulously designed with extraordinary flair and attention to period detail.
Clothes were hugely important signifiers of class, wealth and character at this time and nowhere is this more masterfully illuminated than in the society portraits of John Singer Sargent. I can imagine that the ambitious Bertha Russell would be willing to pay any price to have her portrait painted by that era’s great flatterer. The novelist, Henry James, another chronicler of the same Gilded Age, wrote in praise of his artist friend, that “there is no greater work of art than a great portrait”.
The exhibition, Sargent and Fashion, now on at Tate Britain is a collaboration between Tate and the MFA Boston. It brilliantly brings together over sixty of Sargent’s sensational portraits and many of the exquisite costumes worn by his sitters. To Sargent, the fabrics, colours, textures of the clothes were of equal, if not greater importance than the people wearing them. He would often have selected the items of clothing he wished his sitter to wear before they arrived at his studio. He captured fabrics on the move; understood the swish of taffeta, the heavy drape of velvet, the rustle of chiffon. He talked incessantly whilst painting and paced around his easel and his sitter. He estimated that he walked 4 miles a day, probably completing a marathon in the course of one portrait. He was a large man, well over 6’ and stockily built but he worked so deftly with long handled brushes and he knew his way around paint.
Sargent elevated portraiture again to the heights it reached at the time of Reynolds and Gainsborough, Van Dyck and Velasquez but he was also a modern painter. His brushwork has the virtuosity of Manet and the luminosity of Monet. HIs paintings are symphonies of colour which dazzle and sometimes confound. The entirely red portrait of Dr Pozzi at Home (one of my favourites), is shocking in its scarlet haze. Pozzi was a surgeon and a pioneer of new gynaecological techniques. Is the deep red an allusion to his craft - the cardinal of the cutting room? His elongated fingers held up to his chest are spotlit as the instruments of his fame.
Sargent often sought out subjects to portray and these are the most beguiling and intriguing of his portraits. The wistful but haunting gaze of Miss Elsie Palmer entrances us as she sits soulfully alone. The plissé gown she wears has an almost modern, ombre tonality and the thin, linear pleats of the dress are so finely attuned to the perpendicular Gothic wooden panelling she sits against, a feature of the Great Hall at her family home, Ightham Mote where Sargent was a frequent house guest. This visual equivalence between sitter and setting can only have been Sargent’s idea.
Graham Robertson, the noted designer and children’s book illustrator, friend of Oscar Wilde, was another subject of Sargent’s painterly desires and as such required to be pinned into a heavy Chesterfield overcoat in the height of summer. When he complained of being suffocated by the weight and warmth of the garment, Sargent replied “but the coat is the picture!”.
Sargent’s most (in)famous portrait is here, too. Virginie Gautreau was, like Sargent, an American emigré in Paris and a noted beauty with a penchant for taking lovers. She was having an affair with Samuel Pozzi at the time Sargent was painting the doctor’s portrait. Pozzi introduced her to Sargent at the artist’s request and Virginie agreed to be painted. Everything about the finished portrait is unconventional. She looks off to the right, her sardonic gaze cast beyond the picture frame. Her long, black gown is cinched at the waist and cut into a deep V at the neck. This depth is accentuated by a lack of jewellery, only the plunge into the black abyss.
The flimsy diamanté straps are both now placed on her shoulders but in Sargent’s first version, one had fallen down - a clue to her flimsy morals or a challenge to stifling convention? Virginie’s mother recognised the portrait’s threat to her daughter’s reputation and begged Sargent to remove it from the Paris Salon in 1884. He refused but did agree to change the title to the mysterious ‘Portrait of Madame X’, by which it is forever known. The Salon’s audience sided with the mother and was (oh, the irony), scandalised by the shocking lack of propriety on display. Sargent never painted another portrait in Paris and left for London, never to return.
Sargent has been regarded as an artist out of touch with reality, only interested in amplifying artifice and excess. It is true, his is an art of escapism and ‘dressing up’
but these paintings are much more than elitist baubles. They are, in many ways, unconventional and inventive. The costumes he created or selected for his sitters call to mind the annual parade of extravagance and glamour which is the Met Gala. Sargent’s own sexuality was and remains, unknown. His sitters play with their gender roles in ways which look strikingly modern to us today. If nothing else, they are painterly fireworks, which like those that celebrate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in The Gilded Age, are designed to excite and delight us all.
*The Gilded Age has been renewed for a third season . Seasons 1 & 2 are available to stream on Now TV.
*Sargent and Fashion continues at Tate Britain until 7 July.