Art: Instead of Paughtraits

"Portrait painting is a pimp's profession," John Singer Sargent once proclaimed. "Mugs" was what he called his 500-odd sitters, mostly proper Bostonians, British nobles and French socialites, and he sometimes contemptuously held their attention by coloring his nose red or pretending to eat his cigar. "No more paughtraits" he wrote in relief to a friend after he began shunning them in 1910, at the height of his renown.

Scornful as he was of this work, Sargent's portraits almost never flattered, almost always illuminated personality to the surprised satisfaction of the sitter—although in the case of the famed Madame X, Sargent was so daringly personal in depicting her titian tresses and her fetish for lavendar face powder that the exotic sitter's true name (Judith Gautreau) was concealed from Victorian society. "Sargent" meant "portrait" —work high in esteem during his lifetime, low after his death in 1925 when he became confused with less talented imitators, high again now that most of the portraits have found their way into great museums. Yet before he began concentrating on commissioned portraits, and sometimes during that period, and often after he balked and quit the "pimp's profession," Sargent painted people and landscapes for his own creative satisfaction. A big show of these works (see next two pages) opens this week in Washington's Corcoran Gallery.

A Way to Live. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to a weak-willed Phil adelphia doctor whose wife expatriated his family to a never-ending Grand Tour of Europe. He never saw the U.S. until 1876, learning his art in fashionable Parisian ateliers. This pursuit was largely a pragmatic matter, a way to live, as his friend and fellow expatriate Novelist Henry James would say. His style, tempered by Frans Hals and Velasquez, soon showed an ease of execution, joyous color, and devotion to manipulated reality.

His talent was evident at 22 in his abrupt, progressive vision of the orchestra at Paris' Cirque d'Hiver. In his private art he experimented with new ways of seeing; he tried his friend Monet's impressionism, exhausted the old masters, learned much from the arrangements of lights and darks painted by his contemporary Whistler (though Whistler called him "a sepulcher of propriety"). In his The Birthday Party, he used the blurry-faced male figure—who commissioned the work and approved of its final, unfinished look—as a foil to set off the foreground scene of a mother cutting cake for her child. At 42, he painted his expatriate cousins, the Ralph Curtises, in their Venetian palace; the painting opens volumes of casual space that would appall a European painter, such as Degas or Vuillard, used to more rigidly interlocked interiors.