THE GRAND AFFAIR

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.