American Masterpiece or Veblen Good

Kyle Aaron Roberts

In 1899, an American-born economist, Thorstein Veblen commented on the nature of the late nineteenth-century upper middle class of the United States. His turn of the century satire, the Theory of the Leisure Class, conceptualizes what he called “conspicuous consumers” and reveals patterns of leisure within the lives of ancient and contemporary aristocracies. This idea of “conspicuous leisure,” or the self promotion through one’s own purchases, was a popular phenomenon of American-Victorian lifestyle and can offer us a useful framework for understanding the material conditions under which nineteenth-century American artists operated. The American ex-patriot, John Singer Sargent, is no exception; rather, his post-1884 career epitomizes the effects “conspicuous consumption” could have on an artist’s career—a career contained within the confines of an American-Victorian leisurely lifestyle.

To late nineteenth century patrons, Sargent’s portraits were more than just breathtaking renderings of the consumer and his or her loved ones; they were power—power to rise in and/or keep atop the ranks of late nineteenth-century cultural elitism. No other consumer bolstered Sargent’s career more than the Bostonian millionaire, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Gardner’s craving for John Sargent’s work not only epitomizes Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption, but her interest in his work might have been the tilt of the scale that the struggling John Singer Sargent needed after a career-shattering fiasco. This paper will attempt to show the process by which Thorstein Veblen’s notion of conspicuous consumption positively affected the livelihood of John Singer Sargent through Isabella Stewart Gardner’s life of conspicuous leisure. Through his relationship with Isabella Stewart, John Sargent was able to bounce back from a career-breaking situation to become the producer of one of the most sought after possessions of the late nineteenth century—his work.