April 21 – August 3, 2025
September 22, 2025 – January 11, 2026
Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death, Sargent and Paris will include approximately 100 works of art, from preparatory sketches to daring masterpieces, culminating in the iconic Madame X
Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 21, 2025, Sargent and Paris will explore the early career of John Singer Sargent (born 1856, Florence; died 1925, London), from his arrival in Paris in 1874 as a talented 18-year-old art student through the mid-1880s, when his infamous portrait Madame X was a scandalous success at the Paris Salon. Featuring a substantial collection of paintings, watercolors, and drawings, the exhibition will also include a select group of portraits by Sargent’s contemporaries. The exhibition is the largest international exhibition of Sargent’s work since 1998 and the first ever monographic exhibition of Sargent’s art in France.
Sargent and Paris is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
“This magnificent exhibition will shed new light on a transformative period in the life and career of one of America’s most important painters,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By situating Sargent’s work within the context of the city that formed and inspired him, Sargent and Paris will illuminate this influential artist’s meteoric rise, providing new insights into his unique talent and skill in capturing the vibrant society he inhabited.”
Stephanie L. Herdrich, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Drawings at The Met, said: “Sargent’s career was indelibly shaped by the time he spent in Paris. Over the course of one remarkable decade, he created the boldest and most daring paintings of his oeuvre. Sargent and Paris will showcase these visually stunning and ambitious works, shedding new light on his distinctive artistic vision. We are thrilled to partner with the Musée d’Orsay to reunite this collection of great works in New York and Paris.”
Sargent and Paris opens with the 18-year-old Sargent’s arrival in Paris in 1874 to pursue his ambition to become an artist. The precocious drawings and sketches that impressed his fellow students in the atelier will be featured along with his evocative paintings of the French capital. Across the decade that followed, Sargent was immersed in a cosmopolitan circle of artists, writers, and patrons, as he navigated a successful path through the French exhibition system, achieving acclaim and awards. This formative decade culminated with the portrait he later described as “the best thing I’ve done,” the infamous Madame X.
Over the course of this pivotal period, Sargent achieved increasing recognition with his bold, ambitious portraits and genre scenes. The style for which he is now renowned was cultivated through in-depth study of the great art of the past and present, deftly adapted for the colorful, high-octane Parisian society in which he had become resident. As a seasoned traveler from a young age, Sargent also found subjects through excursions in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and North Africa.
Sargent soon excelled at creating flattering, if provocative, portraits that gratified his patrons and their desire for social status. Sargent and Paris will examine the enduring fascination with society and celebrity that inspired the artist to create the now iconic Madame X. The exhibition will look in depth at the portrait, its creation, and the ensuing scandal, and for the first time ever, Sargent and Paris will reunite Madame X with its numerous preparatory drawings and paintings. A nearby gallery will display portraits of Parisiennes by the artists who inspired Sargent and with whom he competed for commissions and recognition, including his teachers Carolus-Duran and Léon Bonnat and artistic role models such as Édouard Manet.
The exhibition will present a nuanced understanding of the painting at the heart of a scandal that is as infamous now as it was in 1884 along with an appreciation for the originality and brilliance of Sargent’s art, underpinning the more sensational aspects of artistic society in 1880s Paris.
Credits and Related Content
Sargent and Paris is curated by Stephanie L. Herdrich, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Painting and Drawing, with the help of Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, Research Assistant, both at The Met; and Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, Curator of Drawings and Paintings, and Paul Perrin, Head of Curatorial and Director of Collections, at the Musée d’Orsay.
Fully illustrated catalogues in English and French, with contributions from the exhibition’s curators and other leading scholars, will accompany the exhibition: A fascinating look at John Singer Sargent’s formative years as a young painter in Paris, a city that helped forge his artistic identity and sparked his rise to the pinnacle of the nineteenth-century art world
In 1874, eighteen-year-old American artist John Singer Sargent went to Paris to become a painter. A mere ten years later, he would be an art-world sensation, sparking controversy with his scandalous portrait Madame X at the 1884 Salon. Sargent and Paris focuses on this decisive early decade in the artist’s storied career, when he first achieved recognition for ambitious portraits and bold canvases that pushed the boundaries of convention. Incisive essays by the world’s foremost Sargent scholars explore his life in Paris—then the epicenter of the cultural world—and the cosmopolitan circle of artists, writers, and cultivated patrons that nurtured his career and helped forge his artistic identity. Authors highlight the painter’s connections to giants of the Parisian art scene as well as the influential patrons who were key to Sargent’s progression as an artist. Presented alongside lavish images of more than a hundred paintings and works on paper—brought together from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe—this publication offers an intimate look at the roots of Sargent’s signature, breathtaking style and his indelible experiences as a young artist in the French capital.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
