CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/24/2023

Gilded Age glamour in 'Fashioned by Sargent'

Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911, is reproduced from new release, Fashioned by Sargent, published to accompany the critically-acclaimed exhibition on view now at MFA Boston. A sumptuous exploration of Sargent’s relationship to fashion—mixing paintings with exquisite costumes from the Gilded Age—this is a book for all lovers of portraiture, painting and historic fashion design. “What happens when you turn yourself over to the hands of an artist?” curators Erica E. Hirshler and James Finch ask. “Who decides what you wear when your portrait is crafted, and what message will it send when your image goes out into the world?… Sargent worked in a reputation-conscious, information-saturated economy of images in which an unflattering likeness or ill-chosen ensemble could signal social disaster. In other words, a time like the present. The outfits Sargent’s sitters (both men and women) wore revealed much, not necessarily their flesh but certainly their characters, sometimes in unexpected ways. Sargent and his sitters experienced their share of critical drubbings, and the painter’s productions were often dismissed as insufficiently decorous, or mere reflections of passing trends. Nearly a hundred years after his death, however, his art remains astonishing for its combination of immediacy and grandeur. Sargent didn’t paint fashion but, rather, made fashion a part of his painting.”