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. Lawrence, ‘having some pretty head popped up on the top’.

Sargent would have done a grand job of Penny Mordaunt at Charles’s coronation

Certainly, he had an eye for style. The shy American who dressed like a banker knew how to make a girl look a million dollars, for which his 1,000 guinea fee was a fair price. To be painted by Sargent was to have arrived – but you had to submit to his direction. The special dress you had ordered from Worth might be discarded in favour of an old blue velvet you’d saved for sofa cushions, and he could be just as intractable with men. When W. Graham Robertson moaned about being bundled into a heavy overcoat in the middle of summer, he was informed that ‘the coat is the picture’.

The picture was what mattered: the look and the ligne.