John Singer Sargent - Portraitist of Paradox

From September 22, 2025 to January 11, 2026, following its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay will devote a major exhibition to John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), marking the centenary of the painter’s death. A century after his passing, John Singer Sargent—celebrated for his portraits of French, English, and American high society during the Belle Époque—remains an enigma. Beneath a façade of carefully maintained respectability, his work nonetheless shocked his contemporaries with its sensuality and candor. Idolized by a wealthy elite eager to pay a fortune to sit for him, another side of his oeuvre reveals his fascination with Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and Venetian gondoliers. This film offers a portrait full of contradictions: an American born in Florence, we follow him from his nomadic childhood across Europe, through the salons of Paris and London, and finally to the United States, his homeland. Although immensely successful during his lifetime, Sargent was later dismissed by the avant-garde, for whom great masters of the past and their “technical virtuosity” were to be cast aside. Today, those critiques have been swept away by the major exhibitions dedicated to the most important portraitist of his era.