John Singer Sargent Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

John Singer Sargent Book

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

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  • Product 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.

  • 1577150422
  • 9781577150428
  • Kate F. Jennings
  • 1 March 1998
  • Knickerbocker Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 112
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