The Grand Affair John Singer Sargent In His World 2022 1st Ed 2022 Paul Fisher by Paul Fisher 9780374165970, 0374165971 instant download after payment.

A great American artist, 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 & 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, & the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain & America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes―& 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 & his unbuttoned work. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself & his sitters―feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating & off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, & the scandals & enthusiasms he caused, & on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, & 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, & traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world & 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 & art, fashioning a biography that grants the man & his