The Secrets of John Singer Sargent’s Jewess, Lady Adele Meyer
John Singer Sargent’s prized 1896 portrait of Lady Adele Meyer and her children (Elsie Charlotte and Frank Cecil), which has been shown off and on at the Jewish Museum in New York, greets us with the image of a graying, 41-year-old, wealthy English patron of the opera, Lady Meyer, decked out in a pink satin and organdy dress. Her pale face is dappled with cosmetics and her dewy Drew Barrymore-ish eyes and lips are hypnotic and compelling. Her plunging neckline does not reveal cleavage, but the painting seems to play with our expectations by offering us a tall man’s view on the world.
Lady Meyer’s figure itself is confusing. Behind all the fabric and painterly nuance, it’s hard to gauge her frame? But who’s measuring? In this painting, which is something of an anatomical anomaly, as far as academic figure studies go, Sargent has done away with the conventional “reclining woman,” just as he has dispensed with the classical hourglass outline that often defines feminine beauty in art (i.e. his painting of Madame X from 13 years prior). Lady Meyer is neither up or down—she is somewhere in between; she is, in this regard, ambiguous, amorphous. She teeters on the edge of an ornately embroidered love seat. Her tiny feet, clad in heels, barely protrude from under her dress’s long hem, reminding us that she does in fact have lower extremities. Her feet are raised up onto a small cushioned stool, making Lady Meyer seem all the more off-balance. I see her as a juicy oyster waiting to be slurped off her pearlescent shell.
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