Yes, Sargent!: London 2024, Part 3

This next part of our London stories is meant to feel like our time there did; a lot of normal living, albeit in heightened circumstances, along with a smattering of “holy wow!” The daily routine was established pretty quickly; dogs will do that to a schedule. We started off getting up around 7:30-8:00am, but a couple days in there was clear evidence (ahem) that we needed to get an earlier start to the day. After some tweaks we settle on 6:30 as a safe bet to wake Molly from her bed and take her straight to a walk, which works like a charm. Bookend that with going to bed at a decent hour (because we’re going to be up at 6:30!) and we had the bones of a pretty regular schedule. We did little batches of shopping, which had as walking through the neighborhood every day or two to get to the market for a backpack full of vittles, and went about our usual hobbies; writing, reading for pleasure, hanging out or even staring at the boob tube. Of course, that was just the routine, from which we occasionally deviated…

When we initially scheduled this particular trip to London, one of the first pins we dropped on our map was for the “Sargent and Fashion” exhibition at the Tate Britain. (The Tate organization(?) also has the major “modern” art gallery in the city, but we’re fuddy duddies and gravitate to the elder institution.) Most people know John Singer Sargent, if they know him at all, as the guy who did the (infamous) Portrait of Madame X, or as Lisa calls it, “The Woman Who Glows”; she’s not wrong! He was a very in-demand protraitist whose client list would sound like a “who’s who” of high society… if you were rich at the turn of the 20th Century, at least.

Funnily enough, we didn’t get a great look at her on this trip – she gathers quite a crowd, natural light coming in from the ceiling windows led to a glare from some angles, plus – and this is one of those things we hear ourselves say and still don’t quite believe it – we’d already had plenty of time with her when we saw her at the Met in New York City. Instead, we explored this Sargent<-> fashion connection in greater depth. Well.

The link to fashion was frankly tenuous, but it turned out that we didn’t care. Apparently he was known for paying extra attention to how his sitters were styled. They couldn’t just show up in a favorite frock, he told them what to wear and then tended to work with the cloth to produce specific effects. One example is his Portrait of Lady Sasson (link to the image). From the exhibit:

Sargent manipulated the cloak, wrapping it around Lady Sassoon to foreground the play of light on the fabric. The bright pink lining of the cloak, barely noticeable in real life, creates a sinuous diagonal streak which guides the viewer’s eye across the surface of the portrait.

The collection included many we hadn’t seen before including children playing with Japanese lanterns in the garden (Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose), and the ridiculously sensuous Dr. Pozzi at Home. The latter’s vividly scarlet dressing gown made for a particularly dramatic contrast with the starkness of Madame X.

There were dozens of his pieces on display, and he truly was gifted within his chosen subject matter, so it was a delightful afternoon in the galleries.

Then it was “Bonus!” time. This is a consistent phenomenon (that John has decided to name right this very minute) wherein we discover an exhibition outside of the scope of what we were ostensibly visiting a museum to see but is really cool in its own right. We’ve tripped over an extensive review of Beatrix Potter’s sketches and drawings paired with an exploration of her pioneering conservation efforts. Recently in Vienna we went into the Albertina museum to see the sketches by Albrecht Dürer but wandered into an exhibition of spray paint abstraction that was created completely in situ; John particularly loved this one. This time the “Bonus!” was Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, which cataloged a selection (certainly not all) of female artists who were passed over or ignored by the art establishment for centuries. Note that the timeline is mostly set to have a nice round number; it’s not like women have been on easy street in the art world since 1921, alas…

Going out for a day like this is about as long as we were comfortable leaving Molly alone for. Our hosts had told us that we could stretch it further comfortably, but you know how it is when you’re taking care of somebody else’s pets (or kids for that matter) – they can take whatever liberties they want, but the last thing you’d ever want is to push the limit and have an issue arise. We trotted back home and wandered the streets with our sleepy little tour guide. Another day down, another day richer.