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Go and see John Singer Sargent’s paintings at Tate Britain and you come away with the impression of Sargent as an incredibly savvy stylist and promoter of his sitters — the elite of London, Paris, New York and Boston. That’s not to downplay his talent as an artist, because Sargent and Fashion shows he was brilliantly skilled, producing images with real staying power. You may not know much now about the people — then famous — he painted more than a century ago, but the pictures themselves still exert a fascination. 

Flamboyant — that’s perhaps the adjective to use when describing Sargent’s most striking works, and flamboyant’s definitely the word for Dr Pozzi at Home. 

Drama, then, and here again in the painting known as Madame X. 

Madame X is Virginie Gautreau, like Sargent an American in Paris and seemingly cut from the same mould. Gautreau was admired in Parisian social circles for her appearance, which, we’re told, she enhanced with exaggerated white make-up and striking gowns. You might think that dress is pretty daring for 1884, but it’s not as daring as Sargent’s original version of the painting, which showed a strap slipping off her right shoulder. Critics at the Paris Salon denounced that as indecent, and Gautreau’s mother lamented the damage to her daughter’s reputation. Madame X herself called it a masterpiece, and Sargent protested he’d painted her “exactly as she was dressed”. 

As Oscar Wilde was to write a few years later, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” 

Sargent loved black. He adored the work of Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. One of the best of the many anecdotes in this show tells how Sargent, on a visit to Claude Monet, couldn’t do any work because the Impressionist didn’t have any black paint. 

Black is certainly the dominant colour in the first painting you see: this picture of Lady Sassoon, a friend of Sargent and a frequent subject in his art, wrapped in a taffeta opera cloak.

The cloak itself is displayed alongside, and the comparison gives you a really good idea of how Sargent manipulated the clothes his sitters wore to great effect. Draped over a mannequin, you catch a glimpse, but really only a glimpse, of the pink lining to the cloak made by the Worth fashion house. 

Sargent makes his model wrap the cloak around herself, turning the lining outward to give a dramatic diagonal slash of pink across the canvas. As well as the cloak, there are several more original costumes scattered through the exhibition, but right at the start, this one provides perhaps the best example of how Sargent choreographed his materials.