Dazzling but it’s all show: Tate Britain’s Sargent and Fashion reviewed

Madame Ramon Subercaseaux, the beautiful wife of a Chilean diplomat, was not a Parisienne. So when the 25-year-old John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her in a black and white ensemble straight out of the Renoir playbook won a second-class medal at the 1881 Paris Salon, French pride was wounded. Édouard Pailleron, father of the purebred French children in Sargent’s other Salon submission, kicked up a fuss and had to be placated with another medal. But that was nothing to the scandal that erupted three years later over the American artist’s provocative portrait of femme du monde Virginie Gautreau, salaciously anonymised as ‘Madame X’.

Two years later, he left Paris for London, where a woman could at least dress as a Parisienne and there was no ‘appellation d’origine contrôlée’ about it. Here he ran into a different problem: he was considered too fashion-conscious for a painter. His portraits were ‘nothing but yards and yards of satin from the most expensive shops’, bitched D.H.