I share a birthday with John Singer Sargent: January 12. It’s just a quirk of dates and means nothing. But for the kinds of inchoate human reasons that swirl about in the darker and stupider regions of the mind, it has always made him feel closer to me than other artists. Perhaps it is why I have been harsh with him in some reviews. With Sargent, it feels personal.
Not that I am alone in mistrusting the talents of this flashy, quick-wristed, heiress-hunting society lapdog, who strolled about the fashionable salons of Europe in white linen sniffing out the money. For most of the 20th century Sargent (1856-1925) was looked down on by critics as a decadent presence. His pictorial talents were obvious. But so was his absence of heft.
Recently, however, opinion has shifted. The further we get from Sargent’s times, the less it seems to matter that he was such a blatant anachronism: the Van Dyck of the Edwardian era, an old master among the modernists. With Sargent, we’re on a reputational journey. And the elegant event that has opened at Kenwood House in Hampstead constitutes another step.
Entitled Heiress (and focusing on entitled heiresses!), the exhibition brings together two dozen or so likenesses of the women who used to be dismissed as “dollar princesses”: moneyed American daughters who arrived in Britain with pots of Daddy’s cash, found themselves an impoverished English lord to marry, and ended up constituting a spicy slice of Edwardian society. There were, apparently, 102 of these American pirates of love washed up on our shores in the years 1870-1914. Sargent painted 30 of them.
They range from the formidable Nancy Astor, from Virginia, the first woman to sit as an MP in the British parliament, to the louche Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, from Alabama, whose first husband made his money in Argentinian beef and whose second was Lord Curzon, viceroy of India. Grace would later become the lover of Oswald Mosley, as did three of her stepdaughters, forming a perverted fascist fan club of adoring female Curzons.
Nancy Astor, meanwhile, was a Nazi sympathiser and a fervent Christian Scientist who opposed Jews and Catholics working for her husband’s newspaper, The Observer. Running through the show, therefore, is an underground river of antisemitic prejudice and Mega sympathies — an imported desire to make England great again — that stays hidden beneath the surface flashes of Sargent’s flashy brushwork. Oops. Forget I said that. It’s that birthday closeness thing again.
The exhibition’s actual aim, stated clearly in its opening captions, is to rescue the dollar princesses from the lazy assumption that they were interchangeable and that they came to Britain to prey on ageing lords and senile marquises. It wasn’t like that, argue the curators. The women here formed a varied and active cast and should not be lumped together and jointly dismissed.
It’s a fair point. And the exhibition captions are duly packed with juicy life stories and surprising biographies. Edith, Lady Playfair, from Boston, painted by Sargent in 1884, met her husband when he was still a Scottish chemist and not yet the baron he became. She met her second husband on the links at St Andrews, for she was also a notable golfer.
Not that any of that matters a jot when you see what Sargent has fashioned out of her in his eye-storming portrayal. Her face, calm and confident but a touch horsey, looks down at us from one of those divine painterly heights that make you feel small. What really excites, though, is what she’s wearing: an apricot top in shiny satin that stings the eyes with its tangy orange intensity. Round her neck is a double choker of flashing diamonds and gleaming pearls. Wow.
Dame Jessie Wilton Phipps, from New York, was busy in local politics on the London county council and later, when her eyes failed, served as chair of the Central Council for the London Blind. None of which seems relevant or obvious when you see what Sargent has done to her, squeezing her into a tight number with vertical stripes and turning her into a French-style brooding brunette, the kind of belle époque beauty you might find in a painting by Manet.
When Sargent was good, he was really good. The selection of haute coutured princesses gathered for us here, some painted, some recorded in astonishingly skilled charcoal drawings, makes for elegant and pleasing viewing. It’s true as well that we are guilty of assuming that all these lofty US zingers in their spectacular satins and taffeta were created in the same mould, when really they weren’t.
That said, there’s a sense as well of the tail wagging the dog here. Having decided so firmly to make this show an effort at rescuing Sargent’s American women from charges of interchangeability, the parade doesn’t actually come up with much in the way of huge social achievement or amazing life stories. Nancy Astor aside, none of the assembled cast played a significant role in British public life. Most of them were indeed painted principally because they were rich.
So although the focus is supposed to be on the women, the real target ends up being the painter. Lady Playfair from Boston or the Countess of Suffolk from Chicago are genuine Sargent triumphs of old-style portraiture. Recent attempts to uplift his watercolours, his landscapes, his war paintings and his subject pictures have never fully convinced because, on this evidence, painting dollar princesses really was his forte.
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits, at Kenwood House, London, until Oct 5