John Singer Sargent: His Portrait - Softcover

Olson, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312017790 ISBN 13: 9780312017798

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1988

Synopsis

The New York Times Book Review....".the book is more a group portrait than an individual one; it provides sharply realized sketches of Sargent's family, friends, teachers and patrons-all the extraordinary, eccentric people who formed the backdrop of the painter's life."

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Olson, like Sargent, was an American expatriate. Born in 1947, in Ohio, he lived in London from 1969 until his untimely death, from a stroke, in 1989. Scholar, writer, dandy, aesthete, gourmet, and impeccable host, he was a much-loved and admired member of London's literary world. He authored Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart and edited the abridged Harold Nicolson: Diaries & Letters 1930-1964.

From Publishers Weekly

Like a suave butler polishing the egos of his wealthy patrons and sitters, Sargent turned out 700 portraits varying greatly in quality, notes Olson. Tired of the tedium of portraiture, he longed to do still lifes and outdoor scenes but got sidetracked into painting huge, mediocre murals that mischanneled his talents. This startling, unconventional view of the chronicler of the Edwardian Age emerges from Olson's richly detailed, thoroughly researched biography. The son of a willful, hypochondriac mother and a taciturn, pessimistic father, Sargent became a workaholic, an outsider, a born observer eager for fame but let down by it. Henry James cleared a path for Sargent to settle in London when he tired of Paris, and the painter's friend Monet taught him to work outdoors on a "floating studio," but through it all Sargent remained strangely elusive, a loner, unfulfilled in his role. Olson (Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart follows Sargent on his jaunts to Morocco and Venice and shows how a short burst of communal life in the Cotswolds art colony pushed him closer to arch-heretic Whistler. Photos.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312017790
• ISBN 13: 9780312017798
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352