ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Aestheticism was a movement that explored the notion of visual rupture. Image rendered from narrative, beauty revoked from social and sexual morality – this was a movement that looked to explore notions of colour, composition and symbolism within ‘for their own sake’ maxims outside of any literary or ethical referents. However, much of the scholarship which addresses this movement has typically been divided into two clearly defined factions: Aestheticism, denoting the British school, and Impressionism and later Decadence, as relating uniquely to the French. It was during this period of shift and transgression that the portraitist John Singer Sargent entered the melee. Though the art historical canon has often looked to place him staunchly between one camp or the other, close analysis of the primary documentation in his early career before 1886, from both a critical and private perspective, indicates that his identity as cosmopolitan was uniquely complex and without clear definition. Comparison of his early images with major Aesthetic texts, in conduction with analysis of his relationships with major Aesthetic figures in both Britain and France from this period, certainly indicate that he identified himself as a visual proponent of Aestheticism. However, what this material transgresses is the notion that Aestheticism was a movement that was separated along nationalistic boundaries. Sargent was a figure that uniquely straddled this notion of a Victorian and Modernist divide, often combining Old Master techniques and colour palettes with Impressionist brushwork and subject matter, in an attempt to mediate his cosmopolitan identity into a visual format that engaged with and also advertised his own Aesthetic leanings.
