John Singer Sargent: A Portrait Of René Kieffer As A Child

The start of the school year will be embodied by this young boy, a portrait never before seen on the market, dating from the American artist’s early years in Paris and already demonstrating great psychological insight.

The child looks at you—he even stares at you with a certain confidence—and it is difficult to look away from his gaze, so compelling is his presence. He also unsettles the viewer with a sense of uncanny strangeness, heightened by the whitish light that surrounds him. As you examine the face of the young René Kieffer, the subject of this Portrait of a Child, one cannot help but admire the delicacy of his complexion and his small, rosy mouth, very carefully painted against a light background applied with quick brushstrokes and set off by the large white lace collar of his seemingly very well-behaved boy’s outfit.

The psychological insight emanating from the painting, executed with great economy of means, is impressive for an early work. Painted in 1879, it is signed by the man who would become one of the finest portraitists of his time, John Singer Sargent. The recent exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, “John Singer Sargent—Dazzling Paris” (see Gazette 2025, No.34, page165), masterfully revealed the genius of this artist, who enjoyed a meteoric rise in the French capital thanks to his inventiveness and audacity, before shocking the city, leaving it, and ultimately being somewhat overlooked there.

A Portrait in the Making

So the year is 1879. At the Salon of that year, Sargent—who had arrived in Paris in May 1874, in what was then the epicenter of the international art scene—exhibited a portrait of his first teacher, the highly respected and no less academic Carolus-Duran. The work earned him his first success, and already some critics were suggesting that the student had surpassed the master… The Orsay Museum exhibition catalog states that it was “probably at this point that [he] began to see portraiture as a means of combining commercial success with critical acclaim and of being recognized by the art establishment.”

Indeed, the first commissions began to arrive, including portraits of the two young children of Eugène Kieffer, a lawyer admitted to the Paris Court of Appeals. René and Jeanne are painted in identical dimensions—an intimate format designed to appeal to a bourgeois clientele—but in radically different styles. The restrained color palette chosen for the boy contrasts with the more feminine and cheerful colors of his sister—the pink of her dress and the flower in her hair—and a more Impressionist style. These differences are touching, as they bear witness to the artistic explorations of a young artist trained by a classical painter—a great admirerof Édouard Manet and the masters of the Spanish Golden Age, led by Diego Velázquez—who was seeking to establish his own pictorial language.

Shortly thereafter, Sargent received a commission from Édouard Pailleron, a rising star of the literary scene, for three family portraits, including one of his two children, Marie-Louise and Édouard, which he this time depicted as a double portrait. It is interesting to note that he drew inspiration from René Kieffer’s work, asserting with greater confidence and ambition that unsettling ambiguity that would become his signature style. His career as a portrait painter was launched. This painting has remained in the family of the young subject since its completion in 1879—nearly a century and a half—while the portrait of Jeanne was sold at auction in New York in May 1985. It has never before appeared on the market, which obviously lends it added charm.