The Musée d'Orsay in Paris will present a major exhibition dedicated to American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) from September 23, 2025, to January 11, 2026. The exhibition, titled "John Singer Sargent. Dazzling Paris," will mark the centenary of the artist's death and feature more than 90 works, including some never before seen by the public. While Sargent is considered a true star in the United States, where his portrait of Madame X is regarded as the Mona Lisa of American art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the artist remains relatively unknown to the general public in France.

This will be the first monographic exhibition of Sargent in France, tracing his formative years in Paris where the young painter trained, developed an extensive network of artists, and created his greatest masterpieces. The Musée d'Orsay currently owns five works by the artist, including "La Carmencita," the first painting by Sargent to enter a French institution when it was acquired by the state in 1892 for the Luxembourg Museum, which was then dedicated to living artists.

To complement its own collection, the museum will benefit from exceptional loans from American institutions including museums in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Some paintings will return to Paris for the first time since the late 19th century, including "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (1882) from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. American writer Henry James commented on this work in 1883, noting that the artist "offers the strangely disturbing spectacle of a talent that at the threshold of its career has nothing left to learn."

Several works will be shown to the public for the first time, including a portrait of Winaretta Singer Scey-Montbéliard, held in private hands, which has not been exhibited since 1889. The decade from 1874 to 1884 represents the most decisive period in the American painter's career. When Sargent arrived in Paris at age 18, he experimented and took risks to forge his style and personality.

For ten years, he evolved within the dizzying art world of Paris during the Third Republic, where exhibitions multiplied and movements such as naturalism and impressionism developed. Paris, then the world capital of art, was the ideal place for the painter to make his name. After studying under artist Carolus-Duran, one of the most appreciated portraitists of high society, Sargent matured his art.

In the capital, he did not depict Parisian life but instead created landscapes inspired by his travels in Europe and North Africa, as well as genre scenes that "combined fashionable exoticism with a sense of mystery and sensuality unique to the artist," according to a museum statement. However, it was with his society portraits that he gained his reputation. Surpassing his masters, Sargent immortalized a cosmopolitan society in full transformation.

"His formidable technical skill and the provocative confidence of his models fascinated the public and critics, some seeing in him the worthy heir of Velázquez," adds the Musée d'Orsay. In 1884, the artist depicted American Virginie Gautreau, an important figure in Parisian high society considered the most beautiful woman of the Third Republic, as a femme fatale in his portrait "Madame X," which the artist considered until the end of his life as "the best thing he had ever done."

Yet the masterpiece provoked predominantly hostile reactions at the Salon, with attacks on the model's morality due to her pallid skin (associated with that of a corpse) and her fallen shoulder strap, which the artist eventually repainted to try to calm the controversy. A section of the exhibition will be dedicated to this crucial moment in Sargent's career, which notably illustrates the social, aesthetic, and worldly stakes of portrait art in France at the end of the 19th century.

The exhibition promises to dazzle visitors with its comprehensive look at one of America's greatest 19th-century painters and his formative years in the City of Light. "John Singer Sargent. Dazzling Paris" will be held at the Musée d'Orsay, located at Esplanade Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in Paris's 7th arrondissement.