"An examination of how the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent was displayed, collected, and influential in the civic and cultural development of Chicago, Illinois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries"--
This sensitive and compelling biography sheds new light on John Singer Sargent’s art through an intimate history of his family. Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman focus especially on his niece and muse, Rose-Marie Ormond, telling her story for the first time. In a score of paintings created between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent documented the idyllic teenage summers of Rose-Marie and his own deepening affection for her serene beauty and good-hearted, candid charm. Rose-Marie married Robert, the only son of André Michel, the foremost art historian of his day, who had known Sargent and reviewed his paintings in the Paris Salons of the 1880s. Robert was a promising historian as well, until the Great War claimed him first as an infantry sergeant, then a victim, in 1914. His widow Rose-Marie served as a nurse in a rehabilitation hospital for blinded French soldiers until she too was killed, crushed under a bombed church vault, in 1918. Sargent expressed his grief, as he expressed all his emotions, on canvas: He painted ruined French churches and, in Gassed, blinded soldiers; he made his last murals for the Boston Public Library a cryptic memorial to Rose-Marie and her beloved Robert. Braiding together the lives and families of Rose-Marie, Robert, and John Sargent, the book spans their many worlds—Paris, the Alps, London, the Soissons front, and Boston. Drawing on a rich trove of letters, diaries, and journals, this beautifully illustrated history brings Sargent and his times to vivid life.
A paperback edition of the book described by the New York Times Book Review as 'thoroughly absorbing'. Henry James minced no words in crediting John Singer Sargent with a 'knock-down insolence of talent.' Among the painter's many renowned works, few deserve the phrase as much as The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, which stands alongside Madame X and Lady Agnew of Lochnaw as one of Sargent's greatest images. The painting, depicting four young sisters in the family apartment (first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1883, it predated by just one year the scandal of Madame X), both explores and defies convention, crossing the boundaries between portrait and genre scene, formal composition and casual snapshot. At its unveiling, one prominent critic rushed to praise Sargent's stunning originality, while another dismissed the canvas as 'four corners and a void.' Using numerous unpublished archival documents, Erica E. Hirshler explores this iconic canvas from a variety of angles, discussing its innovative significance as a work of art, the people involved in its making and what became of them, its importance to Sargent's career, its place in the tradition of artistic patronage, and its changing meanings and lasting popularity. Sargent's Daughters is an evocative, multifaceted book that will transform the way you look at Sargent's work, simultaneously illuminating a much beloved painting and reaffirming its mystery
The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the "it girl" of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two must have recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame. Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau's portrait generated the attention she craved-but it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau's dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home. Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal.
Many of the sitters in this collection were John Singer Sargents close friends. They are posed informally, sometimes in the act of painting or singing, and it is evident from the bold way they confront us that they are personalities of a creative stamp. Brilliant as these pictures are as works of art and penetrating studies of character, they are also records of relationships, allegiances, influences and aspirations. This volume, and the exhibition it accompanies, aims to explore these friendships in depth and draw out their significance in the story of Sargents life and the development of his art. The book is structured chronologically, with sections arranged according to the places Sargent worked and formed relationships during his cosmopolitan career: Paris, London, New York, Italy and the Alps. The cast of characters includes famous names, among them Gabriel Fauré and Auguste Rodin, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. But the authors also make their point with images of Sargents familiars, such as the artists Jane and Wilfrid de Glehn who accompanied him on his sketching expeditions to the Continent, and the Italian painter Ambrogio Raffele, a recurrent model in his Alpine studies. In such paintings Sargent explored the making of art (his own included) and the relationship of the artist to the natural world. These are examples of an absorbing range of images and personalities, all distinguished in one way or another for their artistry, and all linked by friendship and a shared aesthetic to the central figure of Sargent himself.
Sargent's reputation is often defined by his remarkable achievements as a painter of sophisticated society portraits. However, as this innovative examination of his career reveals, he created a significant number of childrens portraits and genre paintings featuring children. The title of the book makes ironic reference to Charles Dickens's famous novel Great Expectations, and is used here to suggest how Sargents paintings of children related to the expectations associated with representations of childhood in the art and literature of Sargents day. The book also traces how Sargent ultimately advanced childhood as an artistic subject. The book contains five essays by three notable curators and professors of fine arts, is illustrated with Sargents truly stunning and often lesser-known paintings of children, and includes Sargent family photographs, some of which are previously unpublished.
As founder of the Peace Corps, Head Start, the Special Olympics (with wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver), and other organizations, Sargent Shriver was a key social and political figure whose influence continues to the present day. This authorized biography, exhaustively researched and finely rendered by Scott Stossel (deputy editor of The Atlantic), reads like an epic novel, with “Sarge” marching through the historical events of the last century—the Great Depression, World War II, JFK’s assassination, the Cold War, and many more. Sarge gives us a complete account of Shriver’s life, as well as a thoughtful commentary on the Kennedy family, the Peace Corps, and United States and world history. It is a riveting and comprehensive reconstruction of a life that exemplifies what it means to be a true American.