Fashioned by Sargent

A lavish exploration of Sargent’s relationship to fashion, featuring exquisite costumes from the Gilded Age

"The coat is the picture," John Singer Sargent explained to his fellow artist Graham Robertson in the summer of 1894, tugging a heavy garment ever more tightly around his sitter’s slender figure. More attentive to what he hoped to accomplish as a painter than he was to the dictates of contemporary fashion, Sargent often chose what his sitters would wear. Even when they came to him dressed in the latest mode, he frequently ignored or simplified the details, concentrating on texture, drape and the way fabrics responded to light. Exploiting dress as an integral ingredient of his own artistry, Sargent used clothes to proclaim his own aesthetic agenda while simultaneously establishing his sitters’ social position, profession, gender identity and nationality.

Fashioned by Sargent explores the complicated relationship of painting and dress through lavish reproductions of Sargent’s works alongside exquisite costumes of the period—including garments actually worn by his sitters. Essays by leading scholars illuminate topics such as portraits and performance, gender expression and the New Woman, and the pull of history and the excitement of new ideas, offering readers new insights into masterworks by a beloved American artist.

The international art star of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was born in Italy to American parents, trained in Paris and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent is best known for his dramatic and stylish portraits, but he was equally active as a landscapist, muralist and watercolor painter.

Edited with text by Erica E. Hirshler, Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, James Finch, Pamela A. Parmal. Text by Paul Fisher, Frances Fowle, Dominic Green, Rebecca Hellen, Stephanie L. Herdrich, Elaine Kilmurray, Richard Ormond, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Anna Reynolds, Andrew Stephenson.