Sargent’s El Jaleo: What’s Goya got to do with it?

Janis Tomlinson shares her expertise about Spanish painter Goya and his relationship to the Spain lover and American painter Sargent.

Writing of John Singer Sargent’s painting El Jaleo on exhibition in Paris in 1882, critics were quick to identify Goya’s etchings of Los Caprichos as inspiration. It is time to reconsider. In this conference related to the John Singer Sargent’s Fascination with Spain explored in landmark exhibition at National Gallery of Art, Janis Tomlinson follows Sargent to Spain in the fall of 1879 to recreate lessons he learned from Goya, which two years later subtly informed his masterful scene of Spanish dance.

About Janis Tomlinson

Janis A. Tomlinson is an internationally recognized authority on the Spanish artist Francisco Goya y Lucientes and his era. Her awards include the American Association of Publishers 2021 Prose Award (Biography and Autobiography), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Center International Fellowship.

Her biography, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist (Princeton, 2020); Goya Retrato de un artista (Catedra, 2022) has won extensive praise.

Her books on Goya and painting in Spain have been translated into six languages. They include Graphic Evolutions: The Print Series of Francisco Goya and Francisco Goya: The Tapestry Cartoons and Early Career at the Court of Madrid – the inspiration for a reinstallation of those paintings at the Museo del Prado in Madrid; Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment, published three years later, offered a reappraisal of the artist’s mid-career within the political and social context of his era; a more general study of Goya and another of painting in Spain followed before Tomlinson served as co-curator with the late Francisco Calvo Serraller of an exhibition of Goya’s imagery of women, a joint project of the Museo del Prado, Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She was lead author of the exhibition catalogue, Goya: Order and Disorder (2014).

This lecture is part of the program related to the major exhibition Sargent and Spain at the National Gallery of Art on view from Oct. 2, 2022 to Jan. 2, 2023.