Watching "The Gilded Age"? Behind the Real Artist Who Paints Gladys's Portrait

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was high society's favorite portrait artist. But his oeuvre comes with a few surprises.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, John Singer Sargent ca. 1892. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“There’s a moment when a young girl turns into a woman. It doesn’t last long, and I’d like it caught on canvas.”

These are the words that Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) shares with John Singer Sargent (Bobby Steggert) on HBO’s The Gilded Age, a show that explores the lives of wealthy New Yorkers and their servants during the late 1800s. Russell is married to the self-made railroad tycoon George Russell, whose character was inspired by the infamous robber barons of the period. Among the upper-crust, the Gilded Age was an era of tension between Old Money (those whose ancestors arrived during the colonial era, either of English or Dutch origins) and New Money like Bertha Russell, who is implied to be of Irish descent.

Nevertheless, the United States was barely 100 years old. Even those of Mayflower stock couldn’t claim the lineage of Europe’s aristocracy—despite, in many cases, having more money. Wealthy Americans still took their cues from overseas. As one character on the show quips, the “old people” wanted to be English and the “new people” wanted to be French. Bertha will do anything to secure her family’s place in high society; among her many strategic decisions is having her daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) painted by Sargent.

John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Gladys Russell on The Gilded Age. © HBO

Gladys’s portrait is revealed at a party moments before her parents make an important announcement regarding her future. Admittedly, the painting on screen doesn’t resemble a work by Sargent; one can forgive the show for failing to recreate his distinctive style. While the portrait’s theatrical unveiling before an audience is more drama than real life, it is true that having a portrait painted by Sargent would have been a major status symbol.

The real Sargent was a reserved man, known for being shy even amongst his friends. It is his talent for capturing Belle Époque beauties that made him famous first in France, and eventually, around the world.

John Singer Sargent was born in 1856 in Tuscany to American parents. They were a family of upper-middle-class expatriates who never truly settled in one country, but traveled throughout Europe and lived off a modest inheritance. Sargent’s education was therefore unconventional, though by his teenage years, his burgeoning talent for painting motivated his parents to move to Paris so that he could receive formal training.

Portrait of Madame X, John Singer Sargent ca. 1884. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Though he didn’t visit the United States until his young adulthood, Sargent always considered himself to be an American. At this point in history, the center of the art world was Paris, with London in second place. American cities were far further down the list, as the US was only just establishing the arts institutions that it enjoys today. In fact, it was the industrialists of the Gilded Age (like George and Bertha Russell) who would fund the creation of new museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of many wealthy women to commission a portrait by Sargent.

Sargent dazzled viewers at the Paris Salon, where he made his debut in 1877. His portraits were just past the edge of traditional, adopting daring techniques such as unconventional poses and compositions, or looser brushstrokes that hinted at Impressionism without going all the way. (He was friends with Claude Monet and fellow American Mary Cassatt.) The women he painted were not passive sitters; portraits like that of Gardner or Lady Agnew (above) capture the psychological complexity of their subjects; Lady Agnew’s knowing gaze compels one to wonder what secrets she might tell.

Sometimes, this daring went too far. I’ve written before about the enormous scandal of Madame X, a portrait of Virginie Gautreau that shocked the Salon for its off-the-shoulder strap and bold display of makeup. Sargent faced such uproar that he left France for England, where he found a new pool of clientele. There, he cemented his status as the most beloved portrait artist of the late Victorian period.

For much of the 20th century, as art moved towards abstraction and radical experimentation, Sargent’s portraits were seen as stuffy emblems of a straight-laced era. That is, until historians found his sketches.

A few of Sargent's many drawings of nude men. Public domain.

The “stacks of sketches of nude people” were seen in 1890 by Sargent’s friend, the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey. The vast majority of the drawings were of men, and though drawing nudes was a standard form of artistic training, Abbey observed that Sargent’s were “a bit earthy.”¹ These drawings—beautiful drawings of the male body, if a little “earthy”—were discovered by art historians in the 1980s, forcing them to reconsider the perception of Sargent as a hyper-traditional society artist. Many scholars now believe that Sargent was gay, with his close companion Count Albert Gustavus de Belleroche a likely lover.

Regardless, these sketches reveal a depth of passion and sensuality which simmers beneath his more “acceptable” portraits of ladies. They also demonstrate the divide between Sargent’s public persona and private life. In the context of history paintings, male artists could display nudes of men in the Salon. Sargent chose not to.

Gassed, John Singer Sargent ca. 1919. Via Wikimedia Commons.

However, the image that has always haunted me is his 1919 painting Gassed, which hangs in London’s Imperial War Museum. On the surface, it may seem so unlike the rest of Sargent’s work. Here was a painter of attractive women, far from the luxurious salons and drawing rooms where he made his fortune.

But in the emotional intensity of this painting, I see a through-line to Lady Agnew’s perceptive stare, to Virginie Gautreau’s defiant stance. Sargent was a keen observer of his times, both the gentle and the horrifying. Though the glittering world of his youth was blown apart by war, he painted the soldiers as he painted his ladies: with respect and dignity.

1. Paul Fisher, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), 8-9.