“The drawing is bad, the color atrocious, the artistic ideal low,” raged art critic Louis de Fourcaud in 1884, reviewing that year’s Paris Salon. “Certainly, if the unlucky lady who is thus exhibited could hear the comments made upon her by the passing throng, she would cut it from the walls at any cost!” The creator of the work is spared no ire by Fourcaud, denigrating him as one who “abandons true art and runs after the strange gods of notoriety and coarse sensationalism.” The painting in question would be known by the anonymizing title Madame X; its ‘unlucky’ subject, a mysterious beauty named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. The artist was one John Singer Sargent, a man who forged a prolific career as a portraitist to the upper echelons of late 19th-century society, the fruits of which are displayed to spectacular effect alongside many of the original gowns their sitters wore in “Sargent and Fashion” at Tate Britain.

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Passing through, I noticed something quite unusual: without exception, all visitors to the exhibition were joined in completely silent, reverential contemplation. Such is the power of Sargent’s artistry that it has not lost its ability to inspire awe some 140 years after he put brush to canvas. Auguste Rodin, renowned sculptor of The Thinker, spoke of Sargent as being ‘the Van Dyck of our time’. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wishing to have been a fly-on-the-wall during the artist’s sittings with his subjects. The portraits have, as........

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