John Singer Sargent
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
John Singer Sargent Details
Amazon.com Review 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 Read more 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."---Gary Michael, The Bloomsbury Review"This lavish production boasts detailed commentary . . . covering all phases of the artist's career, from his early landscapes to his famous portraits . . . to his late images of the ravages wrought by advancing technology and WWI." (Publishers Weekly) Read more 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. Read more 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. Read more
Reviews
I was pleased with the substantial biographical text along with the quantity of color plates (171) & black & white drawings (85 charcoal). I purchased this book just to get a full page plate of the Lady Agnew portrait, to use as reference for a copy-drawing that I was working on. I decided to purchase this compilation of JSS's work, since it was a collaboration with JSS's great nephew Richard Ormond, Art expert and director of Greenwich Maritime Museum, combined with Elaine Kilmurray's expertise in Art collection catalogue work. This book gave me much more.My admiration of JSS's portraiture expanded after seeing the John Singer Sergeant exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in Seattle. Especially awe-inspiring was the (at least 7 foot tall) original of "Madame X". This book is a good followup to seeing real Sargeant's paintings. Wish the Sargeant's exhibit would come back to Seattle. I have new questions since purchasing & reading this book.
