Art: A True Visual Sensualist

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the last great society portraitist--the Van Dyck of his time, as Auguste Rodin was the first to say. Twenty years ago, to confess an admiration (however sneaking) for his work was to invite incredulity. Sargent? That flatterer of the Edwardian rich? That fat-cat holdover, that facile topographer of the social Alps, that living irrelevance to the concerns of modernism? But what goes around comes around. Sargent's reputation is back as though it had never gone away. Once again, if one can judge from the attendance at the Sargent show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington (through May 31, and then through the summer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), he has a big public. Are its crowded galleries just another symptom of the explosion in the size of the public for U.S. museums? Or is there a new audience out there for the pictorial virtuosity Sargent represents? The latter, one hopes, but it's hard to tell.

The show bills itself as the first "complete" Sargent retrospective, which in a way it is--the Whitney Museum of American Art's attempt at one in 1986 was smaller and less intelligently planned, and this one does full justice to Sargent's watercolors, an essential side of his work. In fact there probably can never be a complete Sargent show, because his enormous early masterpiece, El Jaleo, 1882, cannot leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. But this is the best look at him in living memory.

Sargent was an American artist. With his older contemporary James Whistler, he was the first American painter since Benjamin West to become famous in England--and in France too. But he never set foot in the U.S. until his 21st year, and only rarely thereafter. The skeptic might say he hardly even qualified as an expatriate. As a boy he had no patria beyond the rented flat and the hotel room, and thus was unencumbered by the tension of nostalgia for early belonging that affects the real expat.

He was born in Florence, the son of intensely Europhile parents (his father was a New England doctor, his mother a clinging neurasthenic who couldn't bear the crude culture of her birthplace). The Sargents were not rich, but they moved from one roost to another--Rome, Paris, Nice, Munich, Venice, the Austrian Tyrol--for the first 18 years of their son's life. All he retained of America was his passport and some traces of accent; yet he held onto both until his death. Sargent's relation to America was neither resentful nor yearning, as it is with so many expatriates. He was a cosmopolitan, with the perfect adaptability of that type. His homeland was his talent.