Sargent, National Portrait Gallery, review: he was so good he should have been better

The artist Malcolm Morley once fantasised about a magazine that would be devoted to the practice of painting just as some publications are to — say — cricket. It would be filled with articles extolling feats of the brush, rather than the bat. ‘Well painted, sir!’ the contributors would exclaim at an especially brilliant display of visual agility. ‘Fine stroke!’ If such a periodical had existed in the late Victorian and Edwardian ages, no one would have been heaped with more praise than John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery is filled with mesmerising displays of his skills. There are so many, indeed, that to list them would be to describe just about every picture on view. There is, to choose an example almost at random, the ostentatious casualness with which a few slashes and dabs of whitish pigment over greenish-grey perfectly evoke the silk dress of ‘Mrs George Batten Singing’ (1897). In the same way, the pinkish-blue lolling tongue of Asher Wertheimer’s poodle, in the extreme bottom left, brings what is otherwise a more or less monochrome portrait to witty, outrageous life.

Or consider the pitch-perfect transition between shade and Mediterranean sun in ‘Ramón Subercaseaux in a Gondola’ (c.1880), which depicts a friend of the painter sketching under a canopy while rippling canal water can be seen beyond. Sargent revelled in such tricky contrasts — his celebrated ‘Carnation, Lilly, Lily, Rose’ (c. 1885–6) turns on the distinction between the evening gloaming and the bright Chinese lanterns being lit by — to my mind — a couple of sickly sweet children.

His portrait ‘Madame X’ (not exhibited at the NPG) caused a scandal when it was shown at the Paris Salon of 1884, because of its unabashed sensuality.