The early career of American painter John Singer Sargent

A close-up of "The Daughters Of Edward Darley Boit"

In The Daughters Of Edward Darley Boit, Sargent creates "an ambiguous portrayal of family relationships"

(Image credit: Patrick Whittemore / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images)

"John Singer Sargent loved people, and it shows," said Lisa Yin Zhang in Hyperallergic. Born to American parents who'd become cosmopolitan wanderers, the painter was only 18 when he moved from Florence to Paris in 1874, and an inspiring exhibition now at the Met captures how and why the young man took the city by storm. Across the next decade, Sargent befriended socialites, celebrities, and fellow artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin, and though some of his early student work is stiff, his potential was obvious, and soon burst through. Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, the 1877 painting with which he made his debut at the Paris salon, catches a family friend "shifting in her seat, the buttons of her dress snaking sinuously around her body." The image turned out to be a harbinger of many great Sargent portraits to come, his subjects "almost always depicted asymmetrically, and captured mid-movement, as if to underscore that they surpass the boundaries of the frame."

"The flow from his easel in the following years was masterly," said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. Among the brilliant portraits we encounter is the Met's own Dr. Pozzi at Home, a "spectacularly sensuous" 1881 painting that depicts a handsome gynecologist known as "Dr. Love" wearing embroidered slippers and a scarlet red dressing gown. "It recalls the papal and princely portraits that Sargent would have admired in Italy, but has greater vigor and more than a scintilla of eroticism." A year later, Sargent paid tribute to Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, scattering his four young subjects around a large room, none fully connected with another, creating "an ambiguous portrayal of family relationships."

All other galleries in this show lead to the masterpiece Madame X, a full-length 1884 portrait that "still startles," said Brian T. Allen in National Review. But don't rush to the end without taking in the many wonderful paintings in between and the way they upended the hierarchy of art genres in 1880s France. Because Sargent is so famed as a portraitist, "it must surprise visitors to see that his earliest Salon submissions were scenes of everyday life from his travels." And when he painted portraits, he chose everyday contemporary settings that make the images more immediate, blurring the lines between genres. The curators suggest that during his travels Sargent sought to capture anthropological types. But look closely. His Setting Out to Fish, from 1878, isn't a study of Breton oysterers. It's "about a sparkling sky, shadows, and light reflecting from puddles of water in the sand." Likewise, Among the Olive Trees, Capri, from the same year, isn't about the young peasant woman at its heart. It's "about a vaporous, romantic ambiance."