The National Portrait Gallery

Sargent Season: The National Portrait Gallery

And the hunt begins… The second stop of the Sargent tour is the National Portrait Gallery, situated right in Trafalgar Square. This museum is home to six of his most amazing portraits, and is the most congested museum in London of Sargents.

After you walk up the stairs to the second floor, four Sargents politely line the hallway. Room 19 (which is all of the women, plus James) includes Octavia Hill, Henrietta Franklin, and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Interestingly enough, each of these women were reformers of sorts, from housing and medicine to education and Jewish women’s organizing. Sargent’s fame peaked around the years these works were completed, from 1898 to 1900, which creates an interesting kind of tension. Right at the moment when aristocrats, dukes, and duchesses were prying for his time, he was also memorializing women who were changing British public life.

Then pivot to Henry James, in the same room, since that one comes with a genuinely wild piece of history. The portrait was commissioned by 269 subscribers for James’s seventieth birthday, and Sargent (a friend) waived his fee entirely. James himself was thrilled, calling it “a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”

It almost didn’t survive long enough for anyone else to see it that way. When the portrait was shown publicly for the first time, at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in May 1914, a suffragette using the alias Mary Wood attacked it with a meat cleaver, slashing the canvas three times before she was stopped, all while shouting “Votes for Women!” It happened just two months after a far more famous attack (Mary Richardson’s slashing of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery) and was part of a broader wave of suffragette action against artworks that summer, a deliberate strategy of treating cultural property as something the public could be made to care about as much as women’s votes.

James, characteristically wry about it afterward, wrote to a friend that “she got at me thrice over before the tomahawk was stayed.” The portrait was restored and now hangs, scars invisible, in Room 19. The quiet gallery wall that was once (briefly) a flashpoint where art history and suffrage history collided.

Room 19, Floor 2

Henry James, 1913 — The pinstriped suit is what I noticed the second I saw this piece. The fabric, the way the stripes bend and shift with the folds of the cloth without ever losing their logic. It’s so, so Sargent. He treats clothing like it has its own anatomy. I can see the human beneath, and the fabric feels real and full, but nothing is overwhelming. While the clothing is beautiful, it really just frames the face.

Octavia Hill, 1898 — Another beautiful one. I keep coming back to how Sargent paints fabric to convey texture without overwhelming the viewer. There’s enough information to read the material as silk, or wool, or whatever it is, but he doesn’t renders every thread. It’s suggestion doing the work of description.

Hon. Henrietta Franklin (née Montagu), 1898 — Fabric, fabric, fabric!! But this one also got me thinking about Sargent’s hands specifically. Across his portraits, hands feel like one of the most telling details of a person’s being. Class, genetics, habits, anxieties- it’s all sitting there in how someone holds their fingers, and Sargent clearly knew that.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1900 — The hair on this one is gorgeous. Smooth, shiny, but somehow still looks like a real person’s hair and not some idealized sheen. Painterly enough to blur the unimportant imperfections without erasing her entirely.

Room 24, Floor 2

Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, 1908 — Not the most memorable of the bunch, but still very beautiful. Small complaint, and probably unavoidable given the building but I hate when large paintings are hung in these glass frames so high up that the face ends up seven feet in the air, tiny by perspective, and usually catching a glare. Regardless, this piece is another reminder of how Sargent’s command of detail creates this ongoing optical engagement. He gives enough information to “get it” but not enough to let your eye just coast. You have to work to put the entire piece together (subconsciously, of course).

Room 25, Floor 2

General Officers of World War I, 1922 — The big one. A roughly three-by-five-metre group portrait of twenty-two generals, and it is so Sargent, so amazing. Kind of like the Imperial War Museum’s Gassed in scale and ambition (you will see this at the next stop), but a completely different vibe entirely. With a piece this size, Sargent’s talent for optical engagement becomes essential. You’re looking at an enormous amount of information, fully engaged with the work, but never overwhelmed by it. Truly, truly amazing.