I recently visited an exhibition considering the importance of clothes and costume in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. (‘Sargent and Fashion’ is at the Tate Britain, London until 7 July.)

The show is a celebration of sensuous silks and satins; of long buttoned bodices and pleated organza skirts; of Chesterfield coats, velvet jackets and crimson dressing gowns. Sargent captures the play of light and shadow across garments, their undulating creases and folds. He revels in the detail of a black tulle dress, a scarlet cape and a mauve sash; the elegance of a Chantilly fan, an antique lace collar and a Kashmiri shawl.

The exhibition prompts us to reflect on the coded language of fashion, the semiotics of style.

Sargent was born to American parents in Florence in 1856. As a child he lived in several European countries, before training and establishing his artistic reputation in Paris.

In 1882 Sargent was so taken with fellow American-in-Paris, the beautiful Virginie Gautreau, that he convinced her to pose for a life-size portrait without a commission. He presented her in a long black evening gown with a plunging neckline, her arms and neck bare, her face turned to one side in a classical pose – and with one of the jewelled dress straps slipping from her shoulder.

French society was scandalised by the ‘indecency,’ and both Sargent and his sitter were stung by the criticism. The artist repainted the strap in an upright position and left Paris soon afterwards. He kept the painting, subsequently called ‘Madame X’, until after Gautreau’s death.

‘I suppose it is the best thing I have done.’

John Singer Sargent - Madame X (with a vintage photo of the original portrait)

In 1886 Sargent settled in London, joining a social circle of actors, artists, composers and writers. His studio on Tite Street in Chelsea had previously been home to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and Oscar Wilde lived opposite.

Although Sargent painted a number of British aristocrats, for the most part his clientele was international new money. Their wealth derived from finance, commerce and industry, and they were set on securing social status – by buying grand houses and estates; by keeping the right company, hosting magnificent parties and making appropriate marriages. The clothes they wore and the portraits they commissioned all contributed to the process of assimilation. A striking portrait would attract large crowds at exhibition. It would be much discussed and broadly reproduced. And a full-length Sargent could cost around $120,000 in today’s money. The exhibition curators term this phenomenon the ‘economy of images’.

Almost half of Sargent’s female sitters wore black gowns. While black retained its association with mourning, in the late 19th century it became fashionable for women of all ages, not least because new synthetic aniline dyes enabled an intense pure depth of colour. When, on a visit to his friend Claude Monet, Sargent discovered that there was no black paint to be found, he declared that he simply couldn’t work.

This period also saw the rise of haute couture. Name brands like Paquin or Doucet provided their clients with what novelist Edith Wharton described as ‘social armour.’ Many of Sargent’s sitters wore outfits from Charles Worth, an English designer who dominated Parisian fashion, and catered particularly to British and American customers. A Worth gown would cost between $10,000 and $30,000 today.

‘I have Delacroix’s sense of colour and I compose. A toilette [a complete ensemble, from the French word toile, cloth] is as good as a painting.'
Charles Worth

In the exhibition, Sargent’s work is displayed alongside examples of period fashion, including several original garments featured in his paintings. Although the artist claimed that ‘I only paint what I see,’ throughout the gallery we can observe where he has adjusted a strap here, removed a bow there. He clearly styled his sitters, pinning, draping, tucking and folding their gowns to create new shapes and textures. For his portrait of Lady Sassoon, he pinned her black silk taffeta opera cloak, so that the bright lining was more visible, creating a dramatic river of pink.

Foreshadowing today’s Instagram culture, one French critic noted, ‘there is now a class who dress after pictures, and when they buy a gown ask ‘will it paint?’’

Sargent was just as interested in painting fashionable men as women.

The surgeon Samuel Pozzi stands proud in a red dressing gown and Turkish slippers, one hand on heart and the other toying with the cord of his robe.

The debonair Lord Ribblesdale looks rather superior in a long dark velvet-collared coat, buff breeches and polished black boots. Sporting grey kid gloves and a hunting whip, the elegant outfit is completed with a top hat and flamboyant silk muffler tied to one side. It was said of Ribblesdale that ‘he never stepped out of his picture frame.’

Sargent painted the young illustrator and designer W Graham Robertson holding a jade-topped walking stick and wearing a long, black wool Chesterfield overcoat. Robertson recalled that, during the sittings, the artist would ‘pull and drag the unfortunate coat more and more closely around me until it might have been draping a lamp-post.’ Sargent subsequently declared:

‘The coat is the picture.’

John Singer Sargent - W Graham Robertson

All in all, it’s a splendid exhibition, full of glamour, performance and personality.

Whilst marvelling at the flamboyance of the fashions featured in Sargent’s portraits, we may imagine that the sartorial codes and social values of late 19th century high society are a million miles away from our own. Surely we live in a more liberated, egalitarian world of informal attitudes and casualised style.

But clothes continue to signal something about our individual identity and sense of belonging.
In the first half of my career, I dressed casually for work. Until my clients donned trainers, chinos and Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. I promptly switched to city suits, keen to create some distance and differentiation. I was amused to learn that Sargent played a similar game. While painting his clientele in their elegant finery, he himself tended to wear a sober business suit.

On encountering the artist in 1899, the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt described him as ‘a rather good-looking fellow in a pot hat, whom at my first sight I took to be a superior mechanic.’

Whether we like it or not, we are constantly judging and being judged.

'When you wear your high-heeled boots with your hip-hugger suit,
It's all right, you're outta sight.
And you wear that cute mini-skirt with your brother's sloppy shirt,
I admit it, girl, that I can dig it.

When you wear your bell bottom pants,
I just stand there in a trance.
I can't move, you're in the groove.
Would you believe, little girl, that I am crazy about you?

When you wear those big earrings, long hair and things,
You got style, girl, that sure is wild.
And you wear that cute trench coat and you're standing and posing,
You got soul, you got too much soul.’

Brenton Wood, 'The Oogum Boogum Song’ (A Smith)

No. 474

Sometimes a revolution can be so successful that its principles and values become a new mainstream. Ironically the force of the original revolutionary impulse can be lost with the passing of the years, because, viewed from the perspective of history and hindsight, it all seems rather obvious. What was once incendiary and anarchic quickly becomes unthreatening and conventional.

Forgotten revolutions are worth revisiting because we may also be forgetting insights and perspectives that could be useful and relevant to the modern day. In remembering what sparked the revolutions of the past, we can challenge our own assumptions about the future.

Consider three great French revolutionary artists of the nineteenth century: Delacroix and the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis.

Delacroix’s Sentimental Revolution

There’s currently an exhibition dedicated to Eugene Delacroix at the National Gallery in London. (Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art runs until 22 May)

Delacroix certainly looks revolutionary. In his self-portraits he sports lustrous dark locks and he stares out at us with poise and a knowing confidence. He was greatly admired by many of the titans of modern art that followed him: Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh and Matisse. They copied his work, wrote about his influence, painted bizarre tributes to him.

‘We all use Delacroix’s language now.’
Paul Cezanne

But to today’s eyes Delacroix comes across as rather classical and traditional. He painted landscapes, lion hunts and harems; triumphant heroism from history and sensual scenes from the Bible.

So what was it about Delacroix’s art that his successors so admired? In what sense was he a revolutionary modernist?

We need to understand the context in which Delacroix was working in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was reacting against the stiffness and formality of conventional French Academic painting. He shunned its cold intellectualism, its rigorous adherence to the rules of composition. He abhorred its ‘slavish imitation’ of reality.

‘The first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye.’
Eugene Delacroix

Delacroix’s work is vibrant, colourful, sensual. It is energetic, always on the move. He painted at speed, with freedom, vigour and distortion. The artist Odilon Redon said that his was ‘a triumph of sentiment over form.’

Delacroix - Christ on the Sea of Galilee

Having had it drawn to my attention, I found myself admiring Delacroix’s commitment to sentiment and spontaneity. He is conventionally said to represent the end of romanticism. But now I understood why the exhibition positions him at the beginning of modernism.

Have we in the marketing world, I wonder, slipped back into the easy conservatism of the bourgeois Academy, the slavish commitment to structure, form, accuracy and reality? Would we not benefit from some of Delacroix’s instinct, emotion, energy and immediacy?

And, more importantly perhaps, are we writing a final chapter or a first? Do we represent the culmination of a way of thinking about brands and communication, or the commencement of something new? Are we an end or a beginning?

The Lumieres’ Train and the Suspension of Belief

The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is a modest film. It’s only 50 seconds long, black and white, and silent. It shows a steam train approaching a station; the train stops; men with moustaches and hats jump off and jump on; a husband and wife cross the screen, she in shawl, long skirt and hat, he with his hands in his pockets; guards busy themselves; a dapper young chap with a flat cap and bow tie looks awkward and leaps to get out of the way. That’s all, folks.

And yet, in its own way, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station is also completely sensational. It was created by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere and was originally presented to an audience in Paris in January 1896. It was one of the world’s first films.

Not having seen a movie before, the audience was stunned, particularly by the sight of a steam train, heading straight towards them. Hitherto theatre audiences had learned to ‘suspend disbelief’ when they attended a show. Now they had to suspend belief. They had to correct the compelling notion that the train was indeed there in the stalls, speeding directly towards them.

Legend has it that many fled to the back of the auditorium, so convinced were they that the oncoming engine was about to crash in upon them.

Of course, over time we have learned to live with the wonders of film, and today The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station seems rather ordinary. It’s often the case that we are startled, shocked and frightened by the new. But we have a phenomenal ability to come to terms with change; to accommodate it; to see its advantages and opportunities.

How do we recreate an equivalent sense of wonder today? What new technologies can surprise and delight in the way that the Lumieres’ train did one hundred and twenty years ago? Perhaps robots, AI, 3D printing and Oculus Rift can shake us from our scepticism; stimulate our jaded senses; challenge us once again to suspend our belief in what is real and unreal.

Whatever the technology, you have to side with the optimists. You have to imagine that there were a few Parisians glued to their seats at the first showing of the Lumiere brothers’ new film. They may have been a little scared, unsure of what they were witnessing. But they were also thrilled by the possibility of change and the wonders of a revolutionary modern age.

No. 74

‘Will It Paint?’: John Singer Sargent and the Semiotics of Style

Forgotten Revolutions: When the Radical Becomes Routine