'The Grand Affair' by Paul Fisher
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) had the most elusive identity. Born in Florence to American parents, he grew up among expatriates in Paris, where his mother presided over a salon of artists and bohemians. He was 20 before he set foot in the U.S. Although he returned periodically to the States for commissions, he became an American member of Britain’s Royal Academy and many of his paintings hang in London’s Tate Gallery as exemplors of late 19th century English art.
Biographer Paul Fisher examines and evaluates Sargent’s curious, hinge-like position as an artist overlapping continents and epochs. Fisher explores the formative aesthetics and heavily coded gay subculture of Sargent’s era and his role as a modern painter who kept modernism at arm’s length. Sargent was a sophisticated, worldly establishment figure with a rebellious streak. His portraits remain strikingly alive, aware of the circumstances of his subjects—much like the lovely prose of The Grand Affair.
