BEYOND BEAUTY

The suppressed desires and critical reassessment of a great painter.

For decades after his death, the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) wasn’t held in high regard. Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence disliked his work, and others dismissed him as “a society portraitist whose paintings smacked of Gilded Age opulence and excess.” The 21st century, however, has seen a reappraisal. According to Cox, a historian living in London, recent scholarship has challenged the impression of Sargent as “a straitlaced, stolid character.” Cox conducted his own research and discovered an artist who, contrary to his reputation, had “a daring rebel spirit and antiestablishment sentiments.” Moreover, “one of the biggest mysteries of his life was the issue of his sexual orientation, which remains one of the biggest (pink) elephants in the room of Sargent studies.” Evidence of Sargent’s homosexuality, Cox writes, has thus far been secondhand, including speculation regarding his relationship with Thomas McKeller, the Black bellman and elevator operator whom Sargent hired as a model for a famous nude portrait and for muscular Greek gods depicted in the lunettes above the doorways of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. With this biography, Cox attempts to offer a more nuanced depiction. He covers a lot of ground, from Sargent’s peripatetic European upbringing; to his being accepted by Paris’ prestigious École des Beaux-Arts; to his association with such figures as Albert de Belleroche, a handsome young art student who became “the catalyst of a sexual awakening, igniting latent feelings and desires”; and much more. Cox’s approach to this material is dry. He enumerates Sargent’s many commissions without delving deeply into any one of them. But those unfamiliar with Sargent’s work will have a better sense of his life and achievement after reading this book, and Cox offers charming episodes, as when he notes that Sargent got the two young girls to pose for him for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86) by bribing them with sweets.

A thorough if occasionally dull biography of a tormented genius.