John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a 'sort of excess of cleverness'. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality. 'Looking at his portraits', Osbert Sitwell said, Sargent's subjects 'understood at last how rich they really were'. 'Le chef de rayon de la peinture' - the department store manager of painting - is how Degas characterised him.

LRB 5 August 2010 | PDF Download