If you're after an art fix with period drama aplenty, the Tate Britain's Sargent and Fashion exhibition charts John Singer Sargent's cataclysmic rise to fame as the most notable portrait painter of his age, with almost 60 enduringly iconic and unashamedly lavish depictions of the great and the good, dressed to impress. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, the exhibition opens with Sargent's striking portrait of Aline de Rothschild, Lady Sassoon (1907) so even if you're unfamiliar with his work, it will take you five seconds to work out what it was that each of the subjects had in common and it wasn't necessarily beauty. An American born in Florence, Italy in 1856 Sargent was trained in Paris and spent the majority of his life in Europe, working from his studio in Tite Street, Chelsea and forming friendships with the likes of his neighbour and fellow artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, while works such as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-6
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A new exhibition explores the painter's portraits through their clothes - and displaying a selection of the costumes worn by Sargent's sitters adds a dash of the unexpected