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The New Sargents in Town

In the decade leading to his scandalous and triumphant Portrait of Madame X, the twentysomething expat portraitist made the very most of the city’s salon society scene. A new exhibit at the Met, Sargent and Paris, captures a young artist’s decade in Paris at its peak.

John Singer Sargent
The show acts as a retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s artistic evolution: a bit of a bildungsroman of a young man who rises through the ranks of his profession—apprenticing and eventually surpassing a groundbreaking portraitist—while also making use of the literary and artistic society life of Paris. Photo: J. Purdy/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
April 25, 2025

The new Sargent and Paris show at the Met, which officially opens on Sunday, is doing a lot of work. It’s a narrow but thrilling slice of John Singer Sargent’s career—his decade in Paris, where he arrived as a precociously talented artist and left as a master of society portraiture whose crowning achievement caused a contemporary scandal.