GLR March-April 2023

people he liked were subject to his cold eye. Isabella Stewart Gardner, Sargent told his childhood friend, the writer Vernon Lee, had “a face like a lemon with a mouth for a slit.” Eventually Sargent got tired of his meal ticket. By the time Boston’s Museum

Gardner was considered so scandalous by Boston society that she locked it up in a room for the rest of her life to protect her husband’s reputation. His paintings of Mrs. Carl Meyer and the Wertheimer family, who were British Jews, are seen by Fisher as another instance of Sargent’s rebellion

THE GRAND AFFAIR John Singer Sargent in His World by Paul Fisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux 479 pages, $40.

of Fine Arts, Boston Public Library, and Harvard University all asked him to paint murals for them, he leapt at the chance. The murals—with grand subjects like The Triumph of Religion — took fifteen years to research and paint. Meanwhile, just as he had in childhood, he went to the Alps in summer with his mother and two sisters. He was constantly traveling, prefer ably with a friend, and of course his valet. By the time he died in his sleep at the age of 69, in London, he had led a very full life indeed. E VER SINCE THEN, there have always been two lingering questions regarding Sargent: Was he a great painter, or merely a superficial talent? And was he what we would call a gay man? The murals are considered dull and dry—classical to a fault—but what about the rest? On the ques tion of his sexual orientation, he never married and had no af fairs with anyone of either sex so far as we know. Even when he was alive, people wondered why Sargent wouldn’t propose to Louise Burckhardt, the young woman his mother expected him to wed. Others wondered if he was having an affair with Isabella Stewart Gardner when painting her portrait. Then, in 1981, a British curator named Trevor Fairbrother mounted a show of drawings that Sargent had made of an African-American model named Thomas McKeller, a bellhop at his hotel in Boston, and given to Gardner. And there was another group of male nudes, mostly of D’Inverno, that Sargent’s sisters gave to Harvard’s

against the establishment. And then there was Sargent’s love of Venice. Venice and its gondoliers seem to have been a great gay bar for closet queens among the upper classes of Europe and the U.S. in the Victo rian era. The English writer and proto-gay activist John Addington Symonds so loved his gondolier—a man named Angelo Fusato—that he essentially adopted him. Jacques Emile Blanche, a society portrait painter whom Sargent be friended when an art student in Paris, claimed that Sargent was “notorious in Paris and in Venice positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.” (Fisher says in a long footnote that this remark not only comes to us second hand, but its source was a notorious liar.) Then there is the testimony of one of the Wertheimer sisters: “Sargent was interested only in gondo liers.” One look at his Man with Laurels tells you why. Googling the paintings mentioned in Fisher’s book, one be comes amazed at the number of American and French painters whose names are not as famous as Sargent’s but who were all drawn to the Italian working class. In Venice, Sargent liked to roam the dingier streets. His subjects were people who’d never be found in a London drawing room. And yet—and here is the fascinating part—Sargent was obsessed with propriety: a “sybarite” Fisher says, “as well as a shy, buttoned-up man ob sessed with his own respectability.” But—spoiler alert—there is no smoking gun in Fisher, or in any previous biographies. Sargent left behind no papers, only art. Fisher relies not on a paper trail but on Sargent’s work,

Fogg Museum in the 1930s. History is full of cases in which the surviving family members of artists and writers tried to control their image for posterity, such as Henry James’ nephew super vising the posthumous publication of his uncle’s letters. But Sargent’s surviving sisters Emily and Violet were exemplary in this regard; not only did they censor nothing, but they distributed his work far and wide—including the male nudes that Fisher highlights in his new biography The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World . Why does it matter, one may ask, especially when Sargent, like his friend Henry James, was so intensely private? Well, for one thing, there is now something called Queer Theory. “This book,” Fisher says, “does not make a claim that Sargent was ‘gay,’ in the present understanding of the word.” But this extremely well-researched and anecdotally rich biography does claim that Sargent, for all his success, always felt he was an outsider, and one reason for that was his sexual ity. That explains the psychological complexity he portrayed in his sitters, not to mention his choice of subjects: strong women pushing the so cial envelope. His portrait of Isabella Stewart

John Singer Sargent. Nicola D’Inverno , 1892.

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