John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the famous portrait painter, spent his childhood traveling around Europe with his American expatriate parents. After studying at Paris's Ecole des Beaux Arts, he launched his career at the Paris Salon. But scandal ensued after he exhibited his most famous portrait, Madame X. The daring (at the time) picture of a beautiful socialite in a provocative dress, her shoulder strap slipping off, created such a stir among its viewers that Sargent eventually repainted the strap into a more proper position and relocated to London. There he continued portrait painting. Creating lush images full of light and incredible brushwork, "[He] breathed new life into the tradition of grand manner portraiture. Like his great predecessors he made his sitters look nobler, more beautiful than they were in reality.... What Sargent brought to the tradition that was new and different was his ability to infuse into his portraits a sense of the immediate and the actual, as if what we see before us is life unfolding as it really is." In 1907, the portraitist abandoned the craft and focused primarily on mural commissions, like the one for the Boston Public Library, and landscape painting.

This book, the catalog to a traveling exhibition that hits the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among other venues, includes three essays on Sargent's life and work and detailed background information for all the paintings shown. It is a manageable 285 pages, with 171 color and 85 black-and-white images. --Jennifer Cohen


Review
Admirers of Sargent will welcome John Singer Sargent and read it with the same relish and thoroughness that went into its writing. It is an intellectual and visual feast.


Book Description
The remarkable portraits for which John Singer Sargent is most famous are only one aspect of a career that included landscapes, watercolors, figure subjects, and murals. Even within portraiture, his style ranged from bold experiments to studied formality. And the subjects of his paintings were as varied as his styles, including the leaders of fashionable society, rural laborers, city streets, remote mountains, and the front lines of World War I. This beautiful book surveys and evaluates the extraordinary range of Sargent's work, and reproduces 150 of his paintings in color. It accompanies a spectacular international exhibition--the first major retrospective of the artist's career since the memorial exhibitions that followed his death. Sargent (1856-1925) was a genuinely international figure. Born of American parents, he grew up in Europe and forged his early reputation in Paris. Later, he established himself in England and the United States as the leading portraitist of the day, and traveled widely in North Africa and the Middle East. Contributors to this book assess Sargent's career in three essays. Richard Ormond presents a biographical sketch and, in a second essay, reviews Sargent's development as an artist. Mary Crawford Volk explores his thirty-year involvement with painting murals--in particular the works at the Boston Public Library and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that Sargent regarded as his greatest achievement. The book arranges Sargent's paintings into sections that reflect every phase and aspect of his career. We encounter, for example, such famous early works as Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, Sargent's robust and brilliantly lit scene of fishing life in Brittany. We see many of his greatest American and English portraits, including his daringly posed portrait of Bostonian Isabella Stewart Gardner and his audacious painting of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, which caused a sensation in London in 1893. The book also includes important late works such as Gassed, his monumental painting of soldiers blinded by mustard gas on the western front, and many of his ambitious murals in Boston. Sargent is a visually stunning, beautifully written, and perceptive work on one of the most important and admired artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


From the Publisher
The remarkable portraits for which John Singer Sargent is most famous are only one aspect of a career that included landscapes, watercolors, figure subjects, and murals. Even within portraiture, his style ranged from bold experiments to studied formality. And the subjects of his paintings were as varied as his styles, including the leaders of fashionable society, rural laborers, city streets, remote mountains, and the front lines of World War I. This book surveys and evaluates the extraordinary range of Sargent's work, and reproduces 155 of his paintings in color. It accompanies a spectacular international exhibition - the first major retrospective of the artist's career since the memorial exhibitions that followed his death. Richard Ormond presents a biographical sketch and, in a second essay, reviews Sargent's development as an artist. Mary Crowford Volk explores his thirty-year involvement with painting murals - in particular the works at the Boston Public Library and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that Sargent regarded as his greatest achievement.


About the Author
Elaine Kilmurray is an art historian and co-selector of the exhibition with Richard Ormond, Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England and a great-nephew of Sargent. Mary Crawford Volk is an independent scholar. Contributors Erica Hirshler, Carol Troyen, and Theodore Stebbins are curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Though some observers now insist that John Singer Sargent did not live up to the promise he exhibited early in his career -- that he took the safe route in specializing in portraits of the upper crust -- there is still to be found in his body of work a great deal of variety. In addition to portraits, Sargent painted landscapes, watercolors, figure subjects, and murals; his subjects included rural laborers, city streets, and the front lines of World War I. John Singer Sargent, the accompanying catalogue to an expansive traveling exhibition of the artist's work, explores in depth Sargent's life and artistic output and includes more than 250 illustrations, 171 in color.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The remarkable portraits for which John Singer Sargent is most famous are only one aspect of a career that included landscapes, watercolors, figure subjects, and murals. Even within portraiture, his style ranged from bold experiments to studied formality. And the subjects of his paintings were as varied as his styles, including the leaders of fashionable society, rural laborers, city streets, remote mountains, and the front lines of World War I. This book surveys and evaluates the extraordinary range of Sargent's work, and reproduces 155 of his paintings in color. It accompanies a spectacular international exhibition - the first major retrospective of the artist's career since the memorial exhibitions that followed his death. Richard Ormond presents a biographical sketch and, in a second essay, reviews Sargent's development as an artist. Mary Crowford Volk explores his thirty-year involvement with painting murals - in particular the works at the Boston Public Library and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that Sargent regarded as his greatest achievement.

FROM THE CRITICS

Newsday

John Singer Sargent a resident of both Paris and London, was another chronicler of fashion and a servant of the upper classes. The leading portrait painter at the turn of the last century, Sargent had gilded-age society types lining up to subject themselves to his scrutiny. A bevy of actors, bankers and diplomats vied for his favor, as did the architect Richard Morris Hunt and the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted. John Singer Sargent, the catalog for last summer's traveling blockbuster, radiantly illuminates the reasons for the portraitist's popularity: He bestowed an aristocratic elegance upon the unrefined nouveau riche, and he ennobled the genuine nobility, elongating a stubby figure or two here, filtering out a hint of horsiness there. Sargent once said: "Women don't ask me to make them beautiful, but you can feel them wanting me to do so all the time." And he indisputably did.

Alexander Eliot

Produced as a catalogue for the historic John Singer Sargent exhibition which opened at London's Tate Gallery and is now at Washington's National Gallery, this heavy, splashy tome has 160 color plates, 80 halftones and oodles of satisfyingly informative notes. Its two editors and the four contributors to the volume keep their personal opinions and emotional reactions to themselves. Theirs is not to reason why, but rather to take us on a scholarly gallop down the valley of this flamboyant master's massive oeuvre - including his lovely watercolors and miserable murals as well as the portraits that made his fame. -- Washington Times

Alan G. Artner

[The book] encompasses a number of [Sargent's] most famous paintings, reproducing them beautifully in color. . . . The superb introductory essay sets his work against artistic theories of the period. -- Chicago Tribune

Library Journal