Cloud Dancer and the Color of Quiet: What Pantone's Color of the Year and John Singer Sargent Can Teach Us About White

For the first time in 27 years, Pantone has selected a hue of white as its Color of the Year. Cloud Dancer (PANTONE 114201) is a soft, lofty white chosen to represent calm, clarity, and the quiet reawakening in the world. Pantone describes Cloud Dancer as “a symbol of calming influence in a noisy world,” a billowy white imbued with serenity and meant to invite reflection and creative openness.

That's a tall order for a color many people dismiss as "just white." But as I was reminded this past spring during The Met's "Sargent and Paris" exhibition, white is often the most expressive color of all.

A Visit to the Met — and an Unexpected Star

Those of us in New York who are fans of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are familiar with John Singer Sargent’s best-known work Madame X. She has held court over her gallery for more than a century, and her reputation precedes her: the scandal at the 1884 Salon, the falling strap, the lavender tinted skin, and Sargent’s eventual declaration that “I suppose it is the best thing I have done.” 

She remains commanding, enigmatic, and utterly unforgettable.

But please forgive me, fellow New Yorkers, for saying this: as glorious as Madame X is, I do not believe she was the star of the Sargent and Paris show last spring. That honor, in my opinion, went to a painting on loan from the Clark Art Institute, a work that stopped me in my tracks:

Fumée d’ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), painted by Sargent in 1880.

John Singer Sargent, Fumée d'ambre gris (Smoke of Ambergris), 1880, oil on canvas. Clark Art Institute, 1955.15

At first glance, Smoke of Ambergris appears meditative, as Sargent presents a woman in a white dress lifting her garment to capture smoke rising from a silver censer. The title of the work lets the viewer know that the smoke is perfumed. Ambergris is a type of whale bile that was used at the time to capture and bind evocative scents. But it wasn’t the ritual or foreign setting that caught me. It was the white. I mean light. Or did I mean hues of white? I’m not sure to be honest.

The entire painting is a study in its nuances: the veil, the sleeves, the architectural alcove, even the smoke. The Met describes it as a “masterful study in the subtleties of white,” where every surface reveals another temperature, another mood, another whisper of color hidden in the seemingly monochrome scheme. Sargent himself wrote that his only true interest in the thing was the color. That makes this painting in hues of white fundamentally about color. Now I’m the one inhaling smoke!

What Sargent Knew About White — and What Pantone Knows Now

When Pantone introduced Cloud Dancer, they framed it as a color for a world in transition: a soft white that offers clarity amid cultural noise, a sense of spaciousness, and an emotional reset. 

In their own words, Cloud Dancer is a “blank canvas,” an invitation to step back, simplify, and imagine again. More than a century and a half earlier, Sargent was already communicating the same idea. Smoke of Ambergris takes the simplest possible palette, whites upon whites, and uses it to reveal something intricate, sensory, and elusive. That is the secret of white: it is never just white. It contains multitudes.