Hello Friends,
Today we’ll talk about a provocative portrait of Sarah Sargent Allen, painted by John Singleton Copley in 1763, the provocation being her gaze, her behavior in her picture, her relationship with her husband, Nathaniel Allen, insofar as we can gauge from their two portraits. I hear that many of you like to listen to my Sunday newsletter, it’s an absolute pleasure to read to you. Yet today, there are more pictures than usual, so I encourage you to listen, if you want, and look at the same time. Just click on the title in the email you received from me and that will take you to the newsletter page. Listen along and look at the pictures, I promise you’ll be amused, fascinated, and as always find solace in reckoning with our past.
To get to Sarah, we travel to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Did you know that the city of Minneapolis has nearly 7000 acres of parkland? That’s loads of space for walking, cycling, and wandering around urban lakes. Just across the street from MIA, as the museum is fondly known, is Washburn Fair Oaks, a small park with grand trees, a small lake, a bridge, and a spectacular view of downtown. Sit on a park bench, look at the grand facade of the museum, take a few deep breaths, and now we’re ready to visit our portrait.
The portrait is in gallery 322, I almost said “she” is in gallery 322, an old habit of familiarizing portraits because when I study them, I often forget that the people are painted. Putting a gender on her begs the provocative question. Allow me to explain that back in the day when I was lecturing on Copley all over the country, often invited to focus on a specific work of art in a collection, I brought everything I had to understand a work in the context of the artist’s career, the circumstances of the subject’s life, the tenor of the times, and what visitors wanted to know now. When I arrived in Minneapolis to talk about Sarah Sargent Allen, several people came up to me before the talk and asked quite directly: “will you be able to finally help us figure out whether the portrait is of a man or a woman? Is she a man in drag?” Honestly, I hadn’t thought of this question at all. I’ll get back to this question in a bit, but first, as always, let’s just look.
The portrait shows a person in a blue satin dress, full skirt, sleeves gathered with tiny pearls, decorative lacing up the front, sheer white wrapped over her decolletage and up to her neck. A sheer lace cap ties under the chin with an embroidered ribbon, with a flat circular hat sitting on top of the head. The ruffled undergarment shows at the forearms, and gloves pulled onto the right hand, with the other dangling loosely. A lush landscape of full trees against a vivid blue sky provides the backdrop.
Now comes the part in which I share what I know that will help provide some context for Sarah’s portrait. Copley had painted her father, Epes Sargent, in about 1760, a masterful piece of work that many say is Copley’s finest work--fluid brushwork, a seering capture of the old man’s face, and a swollen, age-spotted hand that allegedly floored the painter Gilbert Stuart, who said “prick that hand and blood would spurt out.” Epes Sargent owned most of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which means lots of land, the port, boats, enslaved workers, wealth. Yet he went down in history as a man of great modesty and reserve. Less so his son, Epes Sargent II, a political and religious activist who would be later charged with bigotry and expelled from and sued by the First Parish Church of Gloucester. It seems he’d kept quiet during his father’s life, but when old Epes died in 1762, Epes Jr. quickly tarted up the entire family operation, more land, more boats, more workers, more wealth, set up his own independent church, and acquired all of the personal and household trappings to show it off. The greatest showing off happened in portraits by Copley who seems to have sold his most socially ambitious sitters on the compelling notion that his portraits could make their dreams come true. As Paul Staiti put it, a Copley portrait “was the site of dreams,” an oil on canvas space “that could fulfill their fantasies of themselves as English aristocrats.”
In 1763 and 1764, Copley produced five portraits for the Sargents, at no small expense to them, painting Epes in a lavender suit against an Italianate background, his wife Catherine Osborne in a riding costume, Epes’s sister-in-law Mary Turner Sargent in a spectacular gown and holding a half-shell under a fountain, and our Sarah Sargent, looking like a shepherdess just putting back on her gloves after a day tending her sheep, and her husband, Nathaniel Allen, the only one of the lot who wasn’t having it. More on him in a moment. I’ll put the images of Catherine and Mary here so you can see these extraordinarily fantastical portraits.
I’ve gone into this much detail about the family because the group effort means a great deal to the look of Sarah’s portrait. I think they took full advantage of Copley’s transformational powers, using their money and their extraordinary privilege to reinvent themselves. Or to put it even more bluntly, wealthy white people who turned to Copley to make them look even richer, even more connected to English gentility. Whiter than white.
Which brings us back to Sarah. In cahoots with her sisters-in-law, she got a portrait that is the most fantasy-filled of all. One of Copley’s incredibly smart offerings in his studio was a portfolio of prints after English portraits. Imagine a big file of pictures that you could go through to help figure out your portrait. A little like today, picking a celebrity haircut out of a magazine to show your stylist, or finding some clothing online and deciding to change your look. Sarah Sargent picked William Hogarth’s portrait of The Right Honorable Frances, Lady Byron, as engraved by John Faber, a portrait from 1736.
No matter that the portrait was by then 27 years out of English fashion, to Sarah it must have looked just the thing. I’m imagining, too, that the exceedingly clever and entrepreneurial Copley would have known that Lady Byron was 33 years old when she sat for Hogarth; Sarah was 34, both middle aged at the time. She’s your same age!! And, if he really had done his homework, he would have told her that Lady Byron was one of the creators of the Foundling Hospital in London, a woman of social conscience. I’m including the side by side images so that all of you can have fun comparing and contrasting. Lady Byron’s portrait is full length, we get a colonnade behind her and a yippy spaniel at her feet. But look, same dress with lace-up bodice, same tugging at gloves, same trees. The main differences are that Sarah is more covered up at the neckline, she wears a hat, and her face is her face.
In Minneapolis, now long after those lecture goers asked me about Sarah’s face, it’s clear that staff and visitors are still reckoning with what I’ll call the disjunction between the extremely feminine outfit and gesture and the real face. On the MIA website, colleagues have posted newsflashes focused on this portrait by looking at identification of gender, with a link to Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover, an algorithm that guesses the age of people in art—it gets her age right, another essay on the importance of personality in women like Sarah, “sturdy and confident” but without great beauty, and a final piece about the relevance of Jennifer Aniston’s plastic surgery. The seeking may seem outlandish, but I’ll tell you it is exactly where we ought to be in our exploration of art. Sarah Sargent Allen does, actually, look a little like Caitlyn Jenner. And the Copley portrait really doesn’t convince. He used this trick, many times, with success, a colonial woman taking on the full-blown identity of an English lady and it worked. In this case, not so much. So I’ll try to answer the question, after all of these years, and go out on a limb and say she is not a man in drag, she is a woman in drag.
I doubt very much that Sarah, or Copley for that matter, knew about cross-dressing, which in its strictest sense is a matter of action or behavior, not gender. Think Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tony Curtiss in Some Like it Hot. Or go back further and the tales of cross-dressing include stories from Greek mythology, the cult of Aphroditus, Arjuna dressing as Brinhannala in the Mahabharata, Kabuki, Krishna dressing as Gopi (and that was to be with the Gopi girls, another story entirely). The point being that dressing out of character in order to be another character is nonconformity. And that is precisely what the entire Sargent family did with Copley. They dropped the norms of fishing wharf Gloucester, Mass., and pulled on new character. Sarah, then, is a woman who picked the most feminine print in Copley’s portfolio. She picked a pretty lady and said, please sir, paint me as she is.
But the face. Copley seems never to have changed faces. Remarkable, this, that while he changed clothing, bodies, gestures, landscapes, dogs, flowers, entire settings, he always painted accurate faces. The true face made the picture authentic. Have another look, all of you, at Sarah and also at Catherine and Mary, each is a unique and believable face. In fact, true story, when we brought many of these pictures together at The Met for exhibition, current family members showed up and lo and behold, Sarah’s and Catherine’s and Mary’s descendants look the spitting image.
Which brings us to Sarah’s husband Nathaniel, who, as I said before, was just not having it. He’s a Gloucester merchant, stern and serious, arm resting on his account ledger which probably included an inventory of his enslaved laborers, a thick wad of letters before him while he opens one, let’s not bother him, he means business. There is no fantasy here, and lest there is any doubt of the man, look closely at his face, a double hairy wen, yes those two moles on his right cheek. John Updike called it Copley’s “wart-and-all portrait policy permanized in paint … Nathaniel Allen’s hairy moles and Miles Sherbrook’s acne scars.”
I’d give almost anything to know what these family members actually said to one another, to Copley, perhaps especially what went on between Sarah and Nathaniel, with her wanting to be all pretty and gentle and him gruffly sitting at his counting table. We do have one clue. When asked by his son, on his deathbed, if he feared meeting the King of Terrors, Nathaniel Allen said, no, my son, “for I have lived with the Queen for too long.” So much for gentle Sarah.
Take a Walk
I’d recommend another sit or stroll in Washburn Fair Oaks, or wherever you are today, sit on a bench, look for a tree or a bird. And when your gosh darn phone just clamors for you to look, have a look at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Center for Empathy and Visual Arts, a collaboration of museum professionals, artists, social scientists and others exploring practices and stories from around the globe, derived from works of art to help us understand one another.
And onward
Maybe no bad thing that while Sarah is in chilly Minneapolis, Nathaniel is in sunny Honolulu. Long ago, I started to make a list of Copley’s pendant pairs now split up through family feuds and inheritances or just fate. I’ll think of that more for next week, while continuing with Copley and a husband and wife who wisely decided to be on the same canvas, no separating for them across the divide. We’ll look at Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard, a portrait from 1775 that takes us from Charleston to Rome and back again.
Until then, keep walking and looking, slowly and with courage and curiosity,
Carrie
