New York: The iconic Bay of Naples island of Capri is featured prominently in a new monumental exhibition at the Met in New York. This exhibition, held in collaboration with Paris’s Mus©e d’Orsay, is dedicated to American artist John Singer Sargent and will run until August 3. It includes the infamous Madame X, which scandalized both the public and critics at the Paris Salon of 1884 and subsequently led the painter to move to London, where he gained fame with portraits of transatlantic high society.
According to Ansa News Agency, the exhibition aims to illustrate Sargent’s formative journey, with a gallery taking visitors to the famed Faraglioni island. This island, a beloved destination for artists throughout the 19th century, was where Sargent returned in his early twenties to create paintings. These works have been largely unknown due to their confinement in private collections or small museums.
Capri provided the ideal backdrop for Sargent to recreate an image of rural life appealing to contemporary fantasies of a nature untouched by industrial capitalism, as explained by the curators. Sargent embraced the stereotype of the island’s inhabitants being descendants of ancient Greeks and Romans by adopting the young Rosina Ferrara as a model. He immortalized her in a dozen paintings, such as Dans les Oliviers a Capri, which was shown in 1979 at the Salon. One of these paintings, on loan from the Crystal Bridge Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, depicts Ferrara dancing the tarantella on a roof.
Sargent enlisted the help of his friend Frank Hyde to find a local girl “of a certain type,” and was captivated by Rosina’s Mediterranean features, which were considered nonwhite at the time. Capri was not the only Italian locale that Sargent cherished; Venice was his true passion. On display from the Dixon Gallery in Memphis is a portrait of the diplomat and aspiring artist Ramon Subercaseaux in a gondola, created in 1880. In this painting, according to Subercaseaux’s son, Sargent was simultaneously painting a now-lost watercolor portrait of himself.
The core of the exhibition focuses on the years Sargent spent in Paris, where he arrived at the age of 18 in 1874, disappointed by the teachings at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. Paris was then the epicenter of artistic production, taste, and cultural exchange, with Sargent at its center.
The exhibition celebrates Sargent’s Parisian period and highlights how he used Paris as a base to travel throughout Europe, absorbing influences and documenting his artistic journey. Met Director Max Hollein remarked at the ribbon-cutting ceremony that it was significant that the exhibition concludes with one of the Met’s masterpieces, the iconic Madame X (Virginie Am©lie Avegno Gautre): “A world-famous work that marked the end of Sargent’s Parisian phase-a period of success, scandal, and complexity, before he moved to London.”
