The grand affair John Singer Sargent in his world

John Singer Sargent was a mystery: an outgoing American painter and personage (who hobnobbed with the likes of Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Monet), about whose private life few details are known. Biographer Fisher (American studies, Wellesley Coll.; House of Wits) is uniquely qualified to delve into the artist's life, having helped organize the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's 2020 exhibition Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent. As a portraitist, Sargent was known for teasing out the personalities of his elite subjects, which Fisher argues landed him high-profile commissions and made him a darling of the Gilded Age. This book also sheds light on Sargent's loving relationships with his sisters and parents, his models, and his friends. Fisher suggests that Sargent, who was not out as a gay man, expressed his appreciation of the male form through his art. VERDICT A sensitive biography that fleshes out the personal life of a private artist who was a product of his time. Fisher's work complements and expands on previous Sargent biographies, including Stanley Olson's comprehensive 1986 book John Singer Sargent: His Portrait.--Maria Ashton-Stebbings

The life of an enigmatic artist. In a vibrant, authoritative biography, Fisher, a professor of American studies at Wellesley, examines the cultural landscape in which John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) rose to prominence, his development as an artist, and the "nonnormative complexities of gender and sexuality" that characterized his relationships. In considering Sargent's sexuality, the author contributes to an already robust scholarly inquiry by biographers and historians by taking a measured perspective on what he calls romantic friendships with men such as artist Albert de Belleroche and Sargent's longtime valet, Nicola d'Inverno. "It's unclear," Fisher writes, whether the men in Sargent's circles "even knew about each other's proclivities or consciously chose each other's company on that basis." In the author's view, Sargent was a man "torn between his longstanding inclinations for transgressive passion on the one hand and frosty respectability on the other." Raised in an expatriate family dominated by an unconventional, peripatetic mother, Sargent was "powerfully drawn to dynamic, rule-breaking women," such as his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner and his friend Vernon Lee. In the European cities in which he visited and worked, he was attracted to "decadents and bohemians," street people, Venetian gondoliers, Spanish dancers, in whose company he was able to "give rein to an idiosyncratic genius hardly allowed to show itself in the more conventional Victorian world." Both worlds informed his acclaimed career, much of which was dominated by portraiture of the rich and famous, particularly "stylish, well-connected women." He painted "not only what he knew, but whom, and whom he wished to know better," portraying his subjects with a rare and sometimes--as in the portrait Madame X--scandalous sense of intimacy. 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.