John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women

A major exhibition featuring the works of the foremost American portrait painter of the late 19th-century, John Singer Sargent, is still on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women features approximately 25 paintings of Sargent’s portraits of American women and connects the artist’s stylistic choices with the character traits of his female subjects.

Divided into three thematic sections — Women of Fashion, Women of Mystery, and Women of Substance — the exhibition showcases images of women who exerted leadership in the arts and society as well as in their careers and in the intellectual community. It demonstrated Sargent’s keen interest in exotic women little known or understood by an American audience, and his visual assertion of the importance of mystery in the definition of femininity.

John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Praise of Women features well known subjects such as Sargent’s famous Capriote model Rosina Ferrara and perhaps his most famous (or infamous) subject of all, Virginie Avegno Gautreau, or Madame X, represented in the exhibition by two preparatory drawings for her 1883-4 portrait.

View some of the works in this exhibition.