A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. He charmed the possessors of new money and old, while reserving 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, scholar Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the artist and his work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that London, Paris, and New York high society was fascinated by yet kept at bay. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he elicited, and on to London, where he mixed with other aristocrats and eccentrics, and formed a close relationship with a boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner.
Relating 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.
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"Once in a while, one hits on a really great story, which comes as a giant surprise, and this book about John Singer Sargent was such a reed. I had studied very slight some of his work in art college, but had never been given the details and the history and the gossip That this book gave. There was a little repetition, but not much and other characters came totally alive in the telling of his story. For instance, his mother, which had never been mentioned in any art history class. Very few realize the intensity in the length of his career, and certainly not the backlash of some of his so-called only portraits . I was totally intrigued. And the foreign wording was also very well done. If the foreign language doesn’t get done properly, they should just forget about it as it’s really an insult to the language. "
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Animac (5 out of 5 stars)