by Two women were among the 34 artists who founded the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 – unless you’d know it from Johan Zoffany’s famous portrait of the founders in trousers and wigs. The scene is a life drawing class, arranged around a naked male model. All the artists are busy watching and talking, except for the two excluded women. Angelica Kaufman and Mary Moser, the initiators of the classes of life from which they were forbidden, who are present only as a pair of sketchy canvases – two bright spectrums attached to the wall.
Kauffman (1741-1807) had to wait a long time to return to the institution she co-founded, but the Royal Academy has organized an elegant and selective exhibition that does not exaggerate her gifts. Born in Switzerland, apprenticed early with his father, Kauffman is famous throughout Europe for portraits, self-portraits and history paintings. His social network was second to none. Arriving in London in her 20s, fresh from a painting by the German art historian Winckelmann, pen in hand, she portrayed actors, socialites, aristocrats and eventually the monarchy, before retiring to the continent, where Goethe was a client. The sculptor Antonio Canova organized her huge funeral in Rome.
Half of Sargent’s sittings wore the fashionable black, and when visiting Monet he was unable to work because his friend had no black paint.
She is a strange situation: soft to the point of saccharine, but also sane and firm. She gets a theory about Winckelmann’s drive, and actor-manager David Garrick’s win, a cocky, lively scene turns us right on. Indeed, Kauffman’s own style is a kind of broad theatricality. Sometimes this is a matter of casting – Emma, Lady Hamilton, all simmering sashay in white chiffon as the crux of the comedy – and sometimes it’s in the vaguely painted backdrops and props, like elements of a stage set . But mostly it’s the way her figures pose, point and gesture with the subtlety of street signs.
Jesus, one hand to his chest, is pointing straight up with the other hand: indeed, I am the Son of God. Quick, come this in this way, he marks the painting in a self-mythological portrait, and the muse clearly draws on Kauffman’s other side. Women are at the heart of everything – their uniqueness – begging, protecting, chasing their offspring, listening to poetry, or waiting for the hero to return. Penelope might, through her mouth, have looked properly melancholy if she had not rolled her eyes so high to heaven.
Kauffman was very close to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the UK – her portrait is noble, diaphanous, full of mutual affection. But their friendship was connected to a scandal, since he was almost 20 years older, and satirized by a fellow artist with a painting of a child on the knee of an old man. When the UK threatened to show it, Kauffman sent an amazing letter (it’s here). Rate my sex or return my pictures. She won.
If only his art was so challenging, instead of frictionlessly fashionable. But there are moments of truth among the neoclassical fancies. A female artist, her mouth hanging slightly open, continues to draw the powerful Belvedere Torso. Another, in hand, seems to sweep a rainbow across the sky with vigor. Both have rolled up their sleeves, getting down to business: telling us what it was like to paint a woman in the late 18th century.
Anyone who thinks that clothing is not central to art history can consider the case of Madame X, currently on display in the gallery. Sargent and Fashion at Tate Britain. She stands there, nose in the air, one arm flexed impatiently on a table, making public appearances in (and partly out of) a black sequined dress. Black on black, form-fitting, hard as alabaster, it is very sudden – a dress that makes the painting as structural as its body.
We would hardly know the name of Virginie Gautreau without the frock and her image. For Sargent, both men’s and women’s clothing and often the portrait itself. Liquid silk, sheeny velvet, Lady Agnew’s curls of lavender chiffon, the vague glow of gold frogging, the sizzling sharpness of lemon-yellow satin: everything is expressed with a terrifying synesthetic eloquence.
Sargent – flashy, glib, given to appearances, as interested in clothes as their wearers, the surfaces of his canvas sometimes as bejeweled as a House of Worth dress (many originals included) – is an ideal subject for such a show.
It opens with a huge mass of opera cloaks, as worn by Lady Sassoon in Sargent’s 1907 portrait, lining her rosy complexion flirtatiously exposed. To see them together, object and expression, is to consider the way he (and she) transfers the light into its dead black folds. Her contemporary, Ena Wertheimer, is also tackling challenging clothes, and you can feel the artist’s delight in the way she gracefully rises above her shiny white slip dress.
Sargent can be brushed up: Isa Boit with her chatty smile, her buck teeth and double chin, all rude health in pink and black polka dots. Henry James described her as “extremely amiable … eternally young”, just as she appears. But it can also be white, skimming over dull men in suits. US President Woodrow Wilson: a great empty portrait.
The curator places great emphasis on Sargent’s relationships with American dames and English ladies. The wall texts are funny – feathers and random beetles: “nature’s terrible fashion has gone” – and full of information. Half of his seats wore the fashionable black of the 1880s, and Sargent, who visited Monet, was unable to work during the trip because his friend had no black paint.
Photographs show Sargent moving quickly, fag in mouth, during a session. It stars Percy Grainger and Ethel Smythe. When a foolish suitor reaches for the wrong color, he puts on a silk cloth. It has been reported that sitters start dressing after his pictures, and “when they buy a dress ask ‘Will it paint?'”.
Facing a real genius, Sargent can capture him – the brilliant writer Vernon Lee; Ellen Terry in her beetle costume as Lady Macbeth. But it is certainly more at home with vanity. Lord Ribblesdale rises 10 miles high in his riding coat and absurdly low breeches; but a photograph of life shows that the real man was more ridiculous.
Sargent gave them what they wanted – and what they gave him in return, which was sometimes little more than a social suit and suit. “The coat yes the picture”, he said about a painfully limp watchman. His own self-portrait of 1906 is extremely private: a closed face against the world. But by then he was at the height of fashion, a public figure fit for a cartoon. The great caricature of the witness Max Beerbohm de Sargent is hard on him, with two brushes for speed, setting out the social portraits.
Star ratings (out of five)
Angelica Kaufman ★★★
Sargent and Fashion ★★★★
