The second of two exhibitions from the Musée d’Orsay’s permanent collection, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay is on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
The Orsay’s collection includes a diverse collection of paintings from the Pont-Aven school to pointillist paintings. As you enter into the exhibit, Carmencita by John Singer Sargent is center stage. Obviously, the painting was placed there to show the shifting of painting styles. In the late 19th century the painting world was suddenly confronted with impressionism. Much is made today of the harsh reception that the Impressionists received at the hand of the Academy. That did happen. But not for very long. Many of the Impressionists became very successful. The Post-Impressionist’s exhibition celebrates the many "isms" that followed.
I have gone back four times for one reason, to visit ¡Carmencita! - John Singer Sargent synthesized some of the lessons of the impressionists while still retaining his foundational academic training. You wouldn't call Sargent an Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but he did paint alongside Claude Monet who he admired, and he was influenced by the great "eye"of Giverny who had a few landscape paintings hanging along side Carmencita.
Sargent finagled a live Carmencita performance at William Merritt Chase’s New York 10th Street Atelier, and Chase and Sargent both produced an 1890 portrait of Carmencita. Energetically petite, she wears a coppery-gold costume. Sargent had met Carmencita in Paris before her American debut and when he persuaded her to dance at Chase’s Atelier in 1890, he included his patron Mrs. Elizabeth Gardner among the select and fascinated audience.
Sargent smoothed down Carmencita’s then-fashionably “frizzled” hair to suit his own preference and minimized her heavy make-up. The results were Carmencita in a more formal pose. Aside from being immortalized on canvas, Carmencita and her dancing were captured on film in 1894—in fact, Carmencita is said to be the first woman to ever be filmed, this auspicious event taking place at Thomas Edison’s studios using the Edison-developed motion picture camera.
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