John Singer Sargent, stylist

"Fashioned by Sargent" is coming to the Boston MFA

“I can’t get away from this painting. I’m in the middle of painting and dressmaking,” John Singer Sargent wrote, declining a luncheon invitation as he worked on this portrait of British socialite Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess D’Abernon, in Venice in 1904. The painting will be included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s “Fashioned by Sargent” exhibition, opening Oct. 8. You can’t tell from this image, but Lady Vincent’s black dress is covered with a web of cracks, and right now she’s in the MFA’s Conservation Center, where conservator Lydia Vagts is restoring her – and discovering things: Sargent painted over another dress.

“It started as a white dress, and at some point it sounded like he became dissatisfied with it. Scraped it down and repainted,” curator Erica Hirshler said. “Sargent changed her clothes.”

Painting over the white dress – which Vagts said is twice the size of the black one – created the crackle, and she’s fixing that up. She’s also removing varnish and finding that the renowned beauty, who was in her late 30s, had graying hair (unless Sargent made that up, too).

The show will feature about 50 paintings and more than a dozen garments and accessories, which show how the dazzling portraitist used fashion in the service of art.

Here’s my Globe story about my super fun visit to the Conservation Center, where Hirshler, Vagts and I also convened with John D. Rockefeller.

Images from top: John Singer Sargent, "Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon (Helen Duncombe)," 1904, oil on canvas, courtesy MFA Boston; John Singer Sargent, "John D. Rockefeller," 1917, oil on canvas, photo by Ben Asen, courtesy MFA Boston.