Fashion, social aspiration and pure loveliness combine in the Tate's "Sargent and Fashion" show

It’s one of history’s great ironies that after going to all that trouble to get rid of monarchy and aristocracy, modern Americans are utterly captivated by them back in the Mother Country. My university friends stateside, for example, are far more engaged in watching and speculating over the Princess of Wales’ sick leave than any of my British colleagues.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Americans might have declared political independence but they still looked to Britain as an arbiter of style and culture from their earliest days. American money chose to build mansions that reflected English country houses. They vied to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy. The campus architecture at many top American universities apes Oxford and Cambridge; my sorority quadrangle in Evanston, Illinois, was designed to look like a Cotswolds village.

The height of this Anglo worship must surely have been the late 19th century, when vast amounts of American new money was trying to look old and believed that all things English offered the best fast track to becoming establishment.

Artist John Singer Sargent is one of the greatest representatives of this age, and one of the most artistically significant American expats to sink his roots in England. Those old v new, American v. England stories are lusciously represented in Tate Britain’s new show. It gives us both the artist as an example of the expat-gone-native, and lots of Americans keen to let the Sargent fairy dust polish off some of their New World edges. There are plenty of Brits here, too, but they tend to be the edgier, artsy ones. Even at the top of his game, Sargent’s American-ness would have put him slightly on the outside of the establishment. Such is the fate of the American cousin as immigrant, no matter how long he or she lives here.

This is not the focus of the show, however. It's a perspective I bring to it as an American who’s spent half her life in England. The curator’s objective … and a fabulous one it is … is to get you paying attention to Sargent and Fashion.

Portraits are always carefully composed to make a statement, but the late 19th century took this to extremes. Society was changing, people were leaping up ladders and, for some, power and wealth were growing exponentially. People wanted to show off, and Sargent was the man to help them do that. The show introduces us to an artist who worked much as a modern stylist does today, taking total control of someone’s clothes, accessories, and how they moved to convey a particular message.

Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck did the exact same thing, of course, which I’ve written about in reviews of previous exhibitions celebrating both men. But Sargent is so much closer to us in history that we have far more descriptions of what it was actually like sitting for him. We also, gloriously, have some of the clothes. 

The first gallery lays down the premise in pink glory. Here is Sargent’s magnificent portrait of Aline Rothschild Sassoon, a socialite, artist and intellectual who draws you in with her kind eyes and warm smile. She’s enveloped in a black cloak with a pink lining that gapes open on the diagonal to create a pink slash across the painting. That slash makes the image. It’s somewhere between salmon and Barbie pink, and it jumps out vividly from the blacks of her cloak. This portrait is in a private collection and I’ve only ever seen photos of it; they simply can’t convey how magnificent that pink lining is. Even more magnificent is the fact that the actual cloak stands in a case next to the portrait, so you can compare the reality to what Sargent created. It’s obvious that he twisted and pinned the garment into shapes it never would have taken on its own to get his vision across.  

This sets the mood for the rest of the show. (And will probably leave you weak with desire for a black, hooded opera cloak with a pink lining.) 

We meet Mrs. Fiske Warren, who wanted to be painted in a favourite green dress but was cajoled (or bullied, one suspects) into a light pink number borrowed from someone else while her daughter leans against her enveloped in a wrap of a darker shade. Sergeant has chosen a background of medieval antiques, deep greens and burgundies, out of which the two women shine like candle flames in the darkness. It’s the same trick as the pink slash in the opera cloak, but bigger. 

Then there’s Mrs. Sears, who adored bright colours. One of her Worth gowns is on display here, a sumptuous design but in an unnatural greenish yellow it would take a supremely confident woman to wear even today. It would certainly grab all the attention in the room. Sargent dissuaded her from colour and painted her in a white gown, bringing all of our attention to her personality.  

It’s a real treat to see the famous portrait of Ellen Terry playing Lady Macbeth next to the actual costume. Its bodice was knitted to mimic chain mail, then had green beetle wings attached all over it to give sparkle with a throbbing, Slytherin-esque menace. 

Any fan of fashion will love the clothes on display here, many from the iconic House of Worth. The design details and tailoring are breathtaking. As the corsetry must have been. Everything designed for the women looks painful to wear.  

Not so the men, of course, who look dashing and more than a bit rakish. One small but interesting

diversion you can listen to on your phone while exploring the show is speculation about the sexuality of both Sargent and some of his sitters. The commentator suggests they felt emboldened to express more of themselves in portraiture than they ever did in their public lives.  

If W. Graham Robertson’s portrait isn’t a gay icon, it should be. Despite the summer heat at the time of painting, Sargent made the young artist, writer, collector and friend of Oscar Wilde wear a long, black overcoat a size too small for comfort. Who knew anyone could be so sexy swathed in that much wool. For the ultimate in male sex appeal, however, look a few pictures to the left where Parisian doctor Samuel-Jean Pozzi was talked out of his standard black suits and into a full length red dressing gown and Turkish slippers. He is beguiling. 

Beyond all those wonderful clothes and personalities there’s much to admire here about Sargent’s painterly mechanics. He was a contemporary of the impressionists, and indeed close friends with Monet. You can see similarities to their style in the way his seemingly rushed, almost abstract dabs of paint melt into the perfect impression of lace, jewellery or other fine detailing when seen from a distance. But when it comes to faces he’s almost photo-realistic, given us dynamism and personality that’s obviously very specific to the sitter.  

This show has divided reviewers, with a horrified Guardian giving it just one star while the Evening Standard gushed with five. How you feel about it tends to correspond with how much of an artistic purist you are, and if you consider fashion worthy enough to be categorised as art. Call me frivolous, but I’m all for the frocks and the fabulousness. And I think Sargent would be, too. 

Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain until 7 July. And if this sounds good you should probably check out Diva at the V&A, which I suspect has a similar vibe. It’s next on my list.

Painting the Modern Garden: Sweet, soothing, but not enough

Confession time: I'm lukewarm on the Impressionists.

I understand their transformative influence on modern art. I appreciate the brushwork, the connection to nature, the capturing of a moment, the fascination with light. And yet I stand in a room of Monets and think: "All very pleasant. Would be fabulous as wallpaper, fabric or a mural in a garden room. But is it Great Art?"

I know, of course, that I am in a tiny minority. And I knew, the moment I saw it publicised, that the Royal Academy was on to a winner with Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. Everyone's favourite artistic movement, combined with one of the Brits' greatest passions? A sell-out proposition. Indeed, getting tickets to this exhibit required serious advanced planning, despite the RA extending its hours. We slipped in just five days before the exhibition's close.

Yes, I enjoyed it. How could I not? I love gardens, and here were 10 galleries packed with gorgeous examples. While few canvases provoked rapt fascination, every painting was a thing of beauty and ... as spring brings my own garden to life ... a celebration of the new season.

Monet was the obvious star, dominating several galleries from start to finish. Already familiar with him as an artist, I was most intrigued by the chance to see how he developed as a gardener, from his "starter garden" at Argenteuil to the Giverny we all know. My favourites from his works were large, blue-tinted canvases painted at the end of his career when his eyesight was going. The undeniable climax for most viewers, however, would have been the display of three massive, watery canvases known as the Agapanthus Tryptich. Much was made of the RA bringing these together for the first time ever in Britain, though they've pulled it off several times in my home town of St. Louis. That's where the middle canvas lives ... the others coming from Kansas City and Cleveland.

All very soul-soothing and gorgeous. But I found other artists more captivating. My revelation was three Spaniards I'd never heard of: Santiago Rusinol, Joaquin Sorolla and Joaquin Mir y Trinxet.

All three moved far beyond pretty floral visions, drawing us in to magical gardens with mysterious lighting. I wanted to leap through the frames to explore. The best picture in the exhibition for me was Rusinol's Jardines de Monforte. You're standing in a classical garden room enclosed by walls of clipped evergreens. It's obviously approaching dusk on a summer's day; beyond the hedges the sun is still blazing, but here you can feel the cool relief of the growing shadows. You can practically hear the evening crickets begin to chirp. Nearby, Sorolla's depiction of his gardens in Madrid sent me searching for more when I got home. (Yes, still there. Open to public. Now on bucket list.) And Mir y Trinxet's Catalan gardens, flaming red in the setting sun, were beguiling visions of a fantasy world rather than our own.

Given the topic, the curators took a noble stab at making this show as much about gardening as about art. They explained that revolution was sweeping horticulture and painting, and that major movements like Arts and Crafts influenced both disciplines. Some of the paintings are displayed side-by-side with seed catalogues and gardening implements, and there's an entertaining room 2/3rds of the way through where you could sit down on teak garden furniture to watch films of Monet wandering around at Giverny and look at photos of the featured artists planting, pruning and watering.

But as someone really interested in gardening, they didn't go far enough. Broadway was mentioned briefly, as a favourite venue for John Singer Sargent. (His bold poppies, at left, were another favourite of mine. I could have done with more of him and less Monet.) Yet despite the Cotswolds reference, no paintings featured nearby Hidcote ... one of the most influential gardens of the 20th century. Nor Sissinghurst, or any of the other world-shaping gardens in this country. Almost everything depicted in the show was continental, with the majority in France.  Understandable if you're focusing on the most famous garden painters, but if you're linking art to horticulture ... for a show in London ... the absence of the great English gardens of the early 20th century is inexcusable. I also wanted to know how the artists might have influenced plant choice or colour schemes. We got a bit of a sense that the artists helped make dahlias and irises all the rage, but I wanted more. (There might have been more detail in the audio guide or the catalogue, but I explored without their help.)

Overall, it was an enjoyable show and I'm delighted I went. But for me, they tried to accomplish too much. I would have enjoyed a smaller exhibition, with less emphasis on Monet, that dug much deeper into connections with garden design. But that wouldn't have brought in the same crowds. On the basis of ticket sales alone, I suspect this is one of the most successful exhibitions the Royal Academy has put on in years.