John singer sargent biography book
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The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World
With his beginnings rooted in the Victorian era, Sargent’s world is one of telling omissions and riotous innuendos. In compliance with this long-forgotten code of silence, Fisher recognizes the provocation in a model’s pose, or the shade used to delineate a coveted body. In doing so, he encircles the empty space, in which affection can seek its true embodiment.
Where others might wilt before certain assertions, especially those concerning a strictly homoerotic narrative, Fisher emerges as a steadfast and attentive student of the implicit. Without oversimplifying the man or banalizing an established enigma, he sets out to retrace Sargent’s sooty silhouette.
Left largely untouched by his
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By Peter Walsh
Paul Fisher’s back-and-forth tease about John Singer Sargent’s sexuality starts out as intriguing, then becomes distracting, and finally irritating as the biographer never ganska closes in on his targets.
This biography is thoroughly researched, carefully plotted, and, for the most part, soundly based on fact and not assumptions. John Singer Sargent’s remarkable life and career is traced with energy and enthusiasm.
The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World bygd Paul Fisher. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pages.
One of the most successful and best-known painters of the 19th century, John Singer Sargent had a virtuosity that astonished everyone, from his teachers and fellow students in Paris to the art establishment and his friends Whistler and Monet. At the peak of his career, he earned vast sums creating flashy images of millionaires and aristocrats and their families. Yet, even then, doubts began to creep in. Sargent painted only glittering surfa
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The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World (Paperback)
By Paul Fisher
$20.00
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Staff Reviews
This comprehensive biography explores the enigmas of Sargent’s sexuality and ambiguities of bohemian identity during his lifetime, adding a new layer of interpretation which grants the man and his paintings a new and intense life. Fisher’s narrative provides sumptuous details of his creative process, social milieus, and, for his time, unconventional relationships with men and women. The writing is evocative, almost cinematic. Fisher is a Professor at Wellesley College.
— From LiaDescription
A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch Award
A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècleculture he inhabited.
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