Stuart Macbeth unsuccessfully tries to dodge the crowds to soak up the intimate charm of one-time Cotswold artist, and celeb artist of the age, John Singer Sargent

  • JOHN SINGER SARGENT
  • Portraits of Artists and Friends
  • National Portrait Gallery, London

Sargent’s 1881 portrait of Dr Samuel Pozzi looms out from the exhibition poster. Father of French gynaecology, lover of Sarah Bernhardt, Pozzi would soon meet his messy end - shot four times in the stomach by a disgruntled patient. Sargent has him posturing in the prime of his life. Not in the hospital ward but at home, packed full of sex in a radiant, red dressing gown.

Intimate portraits such are this form the core of the National Portrait Gallery’s retrospective, comprising 75 major works. The Pozzi portrait hangs among Sargent’s earliest, made in Paris while he was a twenty-something upstart. Also in Room One are portraits of his first major patron Edouard Pailleron, his wife and his children.

These paintings have been reunited for the exhibition from galleries in Paris, Washington DC and Iowa. Together they make for an uneasy triptych. Madame Pailleron struggles to stop her dress from flying up the wind. Pailleron’s daughter stares out of the canvas like one of the spooky kids from The Shining.

Next is a room dedicated to Sargent’s time in the Cotswold village of Broadway.

Here is his masterpiece Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose whose beguiling, twilit luminosity never shines through in reproduction. Up close the langourous summer grass has been bashed in by Sargent’s brush. He famously had only a few minutes each day in which to capture this exact quality of light.

To admire the painting’s full effect you need to take a step back. I do just this, and crash into someone. In fact I crash into several people, all trying to take a step back at an incredibly crowded afternoon viewing.

Opposite are two energetic portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. They hint at how adroit Sargent would become in furthering his own reputation, nurturing gossip through dashing portraits of the rich and famous.

Next door, portraits from his time in Boston and London include such blockbuster names as Henry James, Ellen Terry and WB Yeats. There’s also a portrait of Mabel Batten, lover of the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, 30 years her junior, whom she used to call “John”.

By the turn of the century Sargent was in a position to refuse commissions from Edward VII (from whom he also turned down a Knighthood).

In this exhibition you’ll find all the evidence you need of his skill and fame. Carefully gathered in reassuring, chronological order, this is like a Hello Magazine of late 19th century portraiture.

Seen in the flesh these large, painterly canvasses still pack a huge punch today – and their obsession with celebrity more than tickles 21st century fancies.

  • John Singer Sargent Portraits of Artists and Friends runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 25th May.
  • Advance tickets from www.npg.org.uk/sargent

Sargent's Dr Pozzi at homeOxford Mail: