Free Strapless by Deborah Davis Page A

described a lively evening of celebration and camaraderie at Carolus-Duran’s atelier. “We cleared the studio of easels and canvasses, illuminated it with Venetian or colored paper lanterns, hired a piano and had what is called a ‘devil of a spree.’” After years of occupying a narrow and hushed world consisting only of his immediate family, Sargent was awakening socially.
    His social life never interfered with his work, however. He remained the most dedicated artist in his class, practicing long hours to master his technique. Although the other students in Carolus-Duran’s group tried to follow their teacher’s precepts, Sargent was the one who fully absorbed them and made them his own. When he took the École des Beaux-Arts’ rigorous month-long entrance exams, he passed them on his first try. He placed thirty-seventh in a group of 162 aspirants, an extraordinary accomplishment for an American.
    Sargent traveled to Brittany to summer with his parents and his two sisters when the atelier closed for the season in 1875. But when his parents decided to stay in St.-Énogat for the winter to save money, he returned to Paris alone. His experiences as an art student had given him the confidence to live independently. He was on the right track professionally, with Carolus-Duran guiding him toward a lucrative career in portraiture. Sargent felt stir-rings of ambition, and he was ready to face every young artist’s greatest challenge: his first Salon.

A Smashing Start
    A s a fledgling artist, Sargent had to make decisions about what he would paint, and how he would paint it. The year 1876 was important in terms of making these decisions, because the Parisian art world was offering alternatives to traditional academic, color-within-the-lines painting. The nineteenth century, an age defined by revolutionary spirit, saw art movements that challenged conventional aesthetics. Realism, pioneered in France by the rebellious Gustave Courbet in the 1850s, called for a dramatic shift in painting. Realists wanted to replace the academy’s sanitized historical, mythological, and genre scenes with penetrating depictions of everyday life, including peasants and laborers at work. They did so in a direct way, without idealizing or glorifying the common man’s condition, and thus prompted detractors to call their work offensive and ugly. In time, Courbet inspired another generation of artists to start their own controversial movement: Impressionism.
    At the second Impressionist exhibition, at the Durand-Ruel gallery, Sargent had the chance to meet in person Claude Monet—one of the crop of “Impressionist” painters who were revolutionizing art with their ideas about light, form, and perspective. Although many artists and art lovers were enthusiastic about the new movement, these rebels, including Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Édouard Manet, had more opponents than supporters.
    Conservative artists, upholding the standards of the academy, considered the Impressionists to be amateurish and vulgar, and their work anarchist rubbish. But these ground-breaking painters held firm, united against the repressive academy that condemned their spontaneous approach to painting. While the Impressionists were (and are) categorized as a group, they were in fact a non-movement movement. They shared a common revolutionary spirit, but they each had an individual style. They were linked by their desire to paint life as they saw it (albeit each from a distinct viewpoint), rather than as something idealized. They also took painting out of the studio, favoring plein air, or outdoor, scenes that did not rely on arranged props, backgrounds, and lighting.
    Sargent had heard of the controversial artists: the advantage to studying in Carolus-Duran’s relatively progressive atelier was that new approaches to painting were explored along with the old ways. Sargent was encouraged to experiment,