“While he listened he looked”: John Singer Sargent and orchestral imagery

Abstract

“Had Sargent taken to music instead of painting he would have been as great a musician as he was a painter,” the violinist Joseph Joachim is claimed to have said of his friend, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925; as quoted in Charteris 1927, 137). If he had done so, many museums would be emptier for it. Sargent’s portraits of actors, writers, musicians, friends, and patrons fill many Western museums, such as the infamous Portrait of Madame X (1883-1884) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the vibrant Carmencita (1890) in the Musée d’Orsay. Yet the near-continual focus on portraiture in public exhibitions and most scholarship obscures Sargent’s multifaceted talents; he was equally proficient in watercolor, landscape, murals, drawings, and even prints like lithographs and monotypes. Of all his inspirations, his interest in music remains thoroughly under-researched, especially considering not only his active communication and friendship with prominent musicians and composers, but also his patronage of the composer Gabriel Fauré, his own musical abilities on the piano, and his frequent visits to café-concerts, music halls, and orchestral performances (Langley 2018). Music was part of Sargent’s identity as a painter throughout his life and career. In this essay I will focus on a number of Sargent’s depictions of orchestras and stage performances to determine what place these musical works held in his oeuvre. For Sargent’s emotional and sensuous connection with music instigated musical engagement at the visual level that resulted in imagery so evocative, imposing, and enigmatic that it warrants further investigation. It is with this in mind that I want to return to Sargent’s earlier years as a student in Paris, when he was only just developing his own style. Between 1874 and 1879, he was a pupil in the atelier of Charles Auguste Émile Durand, popularly known as Carolus-Duran, who provided a different approach to more conservative and neoclassical styles such as those popularized by Jean-Léon Gérôme. It was during this formative time that Sargent painted the orchestral rehearsals of the famous conductor Jules Pasdeloup (1819-1887) as they were held at the Cirque d’Hiver, or Winter Circus, in Paris (Bernard 1971). His impressions of Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires resulted in two nearly identical oil paintings, both entitled Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver (both dated c. 1879). Sargent made both a monochromatic and a color version, held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Art Institute of Chicago, respectively. In the