GLR March-April 2023

along with the places he went, the people he befriended. It’s as if the whole book is written in gaydar. There is no evidence, but much guilt by association. And it begins early in his career. For instance, when Sargent was still living in Paris, he became friends with the inimitable Robert de Montesquiou (the model for Proust’s great homosexual character the Baron de Charlus), and when Montesquiou visited London with two friends—one of them a boyfriend of Proust—Sargent gave Montesquiou a letter introducing the three æsthetes to Henry James. There are three candidates for the love of Sargent’s life in Fisher’s account. Albert de Belleroche was an art student in Paris whom Sargent sketched in preparation for a portrait he never painted—a face so beautiful it would seem to quell all doubts about his sexuality, and a drawing he kept his whole life in his studio, wherever that might be. The second is Nicola D’Inverno, Sargent’s model, studio manager, and valet for 25 years. No man is a hero to his valet, but Sargent was. After he died, D’Inverno wrote a remembrance of the artist for a Boston newspaper that was nothing but admiring. And then we have Thomas McKeller. (If only we could know who spoke first in the elevator when McKeller took Sargent up to his floor!) The nudes of McKeller are decisive. But in every case, Fisher takes the academically honorable route of saying that all the evidence is ambiguous—a circumspection that becomes frustrating after a while, however justified. So we are left with the following possibilities: Sargent was asexual or, like Henry James, married to his work, or so clever that he had sex with men that left no trace. This was, we should recall, a time when the English establishment destroyed Wilde. (Wilde thought Sargent’s work “vicious and meretricious.” Sar gent found Wilde “very witty” until he read The Picture of Do rian Gray , which he threw out the window.) Perhaps the experience of Madame X made Sargent so leery of causing scan dal that sex was not worth it to him. Wilde, after all, had to lis ten in court to a hotel chambermaid testify to finding shit on his bed sheets. Sargent was deeply private—an ambitious man who took care of his mother and sisters after his father died, travel ing with and living near them. So, the question becomes: did Sargent simply decide that sex with another man would ruin his family’s respectability and jeopardize the career he had worked so hard to build? Or did he have sex but in such a way that no body squawked, even after he died? And is there a connection between his alleged homosexual ity and his art? Roger Fry, the English art critic, said Sargent’s work had “no æsthetic values” at all, but the trouble with Sar gent is that sometimes it seems to have only æsthetic values. Take, for example, the painting called Fumée d’Ambre Gris , re cently on view in the National Gallery’s exhibition Sargent and Spain . A woman in white stands beside a white column, hold ing a white cloak over her head to capture the fumes from a burning brazier. Even Sargent admitted to Vernon Lee that “The only interest of the thing was the color.” In other words, it was an exercise in how to paint various shades of white. Sargent was both a realist and a man painting at a particular moment of art history. He chose not to become an Impressionist like his friend Monet, or a Modernist like Picasso (whose work Sargent dis missed as “ugly bosh, nothing else, ugly, useless, meaningless”). He chose to paint in the grand tradition; his idol was Velasquez (also Franz Hals, the least “grand” of portrait painters). But he

can still seem like nothing but a society painter. Sargent pro duced an enormous body of work, which, like any artist’s cor pus, sometimes succeeds and sometimes does not. But after reading Fisher, one has to ask: was Sargent’s alleged superfi ciality a matter of the history of art (there really was no subject matter that had significance anymore), or the failure of a ho mosexual to find anything in life except æsthetic qualities—a view of homosexuals that is still held today (that they’re all style and no substance)? The trouble with this is that it sounds like the old topic that used to be debated on panels in the 1970s: is there a “gay sensibility”? The Grand Affair is not reductive; it’s a full-scale, fascinat ing story of an exceptional artist, informed by the new freedom to discuss homosexuality in a way that was not possible before. And it makes a persuasive case that Sargent, whether or not he acted on his feelings, was drawn to other men. His bachelor hood, his friendships with people whom we know were gay, his admiration for “divas,” his love of Venice, but most of all the art: the drawings of de Belleroche, paintings like Man with Lau rels , the nudes of Thomas McKeller and Nicola D’Inverno. For all his talents in various mediums, his massive productivity, the simplest things of all (the male nudes), done for his own pleas ure, could have been Sargent’s way of expressing something he could not in any other way. Otherwise, strictly speaking, all we can say is that he was a bachelor. Even now, with all these clues, we must still wonder what sort of bargain Sargent, and his friend Henry James—two men obsessed with privacy and propriety— made with Eros.

March–April 2023

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