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John Singer Sargent in His World
by Paul Fisher
A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited.
A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes―and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself.
In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters―feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent's most daring and powerful work.
Illuminating Sargent's restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
"A vibrant, authoritative biography ... Sargent's 'social and aesthetic relevance―both to his time and ours,' Fisher argues convincingly, derives from 'his representation of an ever-more-complex modernity and an ever-more-diverse and multicultural world.' A sensitive, nuanced portrait." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] sensitive biography ... Fisher wisely avoids making sweeping claims about Sargent's sexuality, choosing instead to examine how 'the protected and sanctioned camaraderie of the studio' enabled the painter's art and social life to take on quietly unconventional forms." ―The New Yorker
"[The Grand affair] begins from a new perspective, investigating every nook and cranny of Sargent's peripatetic life, looking for tangible clues to Sargent the man ... Intriguing ... Fisher indisputably gives us much to reflect on regarding the artist's travels, his social and studio circles, his close friends, and the hitherto largely hidden gay enclaves of the Belle Époque." ―The Wall Street Journal
This information about The Grand Affair was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Paul Fisher is a professor of American studies at Wellesley College and the author of House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family and Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865–1920. He helped organize the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's pathbreaking 2020 exhibit Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent and contributed to the exhibition catalog, which won the 2020 George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for an outstanding publication in the visual arts and architecture.
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