15-05-2025
Heiress: Sargent's American Portraits review — an old-style triumph
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
