The Passion of John Singer Sargent: El Jaleo’s Dancer
El Jaleo: Danse des Gitanes by Sargent, 1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
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Isabella Stewart Gardner was an imperious and eccentric art collector and wealthy socialite in Boston in the latter years of the 19th century. She created a museum where she, and she alone, dictated the terms of the paintings’ exhibition. Mrs. Gardner specified in her will that none of the paintings in her collection can be rethought, rehung or rearranged. If her edict is not carried out, the entire collection must be auctioned off and the museum closed.
El Jaleo is one of 60 paintings by John Singer Sargent (whom she befriended) that she bought for her collection. She had definite ideas of how to show it.
Here is her tableaux for this painting in the museum’s “Spanish Cloister.”
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Painted in Sargent’s Paris studio, El Jaleo was first exhibited in the Paris Exhibition of 1882.Sargent had depended on passion and memory in creating the canvas. He had been to Spain and fell in love with the Flamenco music he experienced and believed that (because of some Jewish ancestry in his family) he was himself somehow related to gypsies, a distrusted, if not despised group in Europe in the second half of the 19th century.
At the same time, Flamenco music performance was becoming popular in Paris. Flamenco evolved from a dance form in India. And indeed, the somewhat contorted hand motion that El Jaleo’s dancer exhibits shows a consistency with this theory. Flamenco had been performed in caves at one point during the gypsies early persecutions.
Here is a performance of this art form
Watch the incredible similarity of Indian and flamenco dance movements here
El Jaleo, roughly translated, is “the ruckus” or “hubbub.” That title is somewhat misleading as the dance is carefully prescribed and performed. The dancer’s slow advance across the stage is highly stylized and definitive, although her “sculpted" white satin skirt appears too heavy and too elegant to be authentically Gypsy but Sargent had a passion for sumptuous textiles. The aforementioned dancer’s hand motion, the guitar and percussive strikes of sticks, the dancer’s foot stamping and flipping of her skirt, the hand clapping and singing are measured. Even the cries of the musicians and the other female dancers watching are timed and rhythmic to the Flamenco idiom -- their own “sonata form” as it were.
Sargent’s audience at the Paris Salon must have been largely ignorant of the culture that produced the subject of “El Jaleo” and also that of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” (a sexy and rebellious woman) which debuted in 1875 at the Opera-Comique. As Trevor Fairweather, author and former curator of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, writes
“Carmen embodied the allure and the threat of both Gypsies and independent women: the double standards of the day...Bizet’s opera scandalized the public and most critics, and was considered a failure...”
The cultural blindness and ignorance (plus prejudice against the gypsy culture), prevented a larger discussion of this painting. More is the pity.
However, I look at El Jaleo in the Gardner, which I did in late September this year, and there is something amiss. A looping brushstroke interferes. What is going on? I didn’t see that coming...
Photography largely corrects this and that is interesting to me. Here is a painting that looks strangely better in photographs (because photography coheres brush strokes) than in real life.
Go figure. That is a mystery to me.
Sargent studied in Madrid and had seen, and was influenced by, the works of both Velasquez and Goya. In this painting, he has combined the use of black, white and red (and the nice touch with the little orange) of the former while incorporating, with the dancer’s not-beautiful face, the Goya in his later phase. If nothing else, it is an interesting comparison.
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I have been a tap dancer for over 60 years. (Boy, am I tired.) And I always had an interest in flamenco. In tap dance circles, flamenco was "tap dancing without the shuffle." 
(This is admittedly oversimplified.) But if you do enough tap dancing eventually you come across something that is flamenco-esque or flamenco-ish for your repertoire. And what makes it work, are the postures and hand movements. And lots of stomping and scuffing. 
--imm
