John Singer Sargent. Albert de Belleroche. 1883.

The way John Singer Sargent and Albert de Belleroche met was the prelude to a beautiful bromance. Belleroche, then a student at Carolus-Duran’s studio, happened into Sargent’s favorite restaurant one night in 1882. The two had met briefly once at a dinner honoring their mentor Carolus-Duran, but they did not know each other then. On that night at L’Avenue, Sargent was so captivated by Belleruche’s slender figure and exaggerated features that he sketched Belleroche without him knowing it. Later Belleruche was overjoyed to find his portrait in the restaurant’s album. He tore the page out and took it home. 

John Singer Sargent. Head in Profile of a Young Man. 1883.

The two quickly began friends, sharing a studio space in Paris where they sketched and painted each other. Sargent painted Belleroche in more thirty works of various poses and costumes, ranging from a medieval courtier to a Spanish aristocrat. Even when Sargent focused on his masterpiece of Madame Gautreau, he was thinking about Belleroche. Sargent’s drawing, most commonly thought of as a sketch for Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast, has been proposed by art historians that Sargent merged Madame Gautreau and Belleruche into one image. The “brooding and romantic quality” in these works, argues Deborah Davis, suggests a relationship went beyond friendship or mentorship.

Sargent had started to draw Amelie but transformed her into Belleroche, an indication of his emotional confusion in that summer of 1883. Some even go as far to say only when Sargent confirmed his desire towards Belleroche had he lifted his artist’s block and allowed himself to concentrate on Madame Gautreau. Could the peripatetic lifestyle and loneliness in Sargent’s early life make him afraid of “otherness?” After all, as an expatriate, otherness was a feeling Sargent knew all too well. Other than his works, however, there is little evidence about the artist’s private life. But if he was gay, does it matter? On the bright side, this speculation gives Sargent scholarship a new direction. Until recently, Sargent was seen as a slick, superficial society painter. Discussions about his sexuality, whether relevant to the art, forces people think about implications of sexuality.