John Singer Sargent: His Portrait - Softcover

Olson, Stanley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312275285 ISBN 13: 9780312275280

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001

Synopsis

REVIEW: "This exemplary biography is manifestly fascinating." (Baltimore Sun)REVIEW: "[Olson has produced] an absorbing, detailed, comprehensive biography of this intriguing enigma of a man." (Library Journal)REVIEW: "Olson`s prose is a rich, almost Jamesian affair, ferociously literate, archly elliptical." (The New York Times)REVIEW: "Stanley Olson has written a superb account." (San Francisco Chronicle)REVIEW: "John Singer Sargent is one heck of a good book. Read it." (The Washington Times Magazine)REVIEW: "This biography conveys vividly and with considerable charm and wit a sense of the social world of the distinguished American portrait painter." (The Virginia Quarterly Review)REVIEW: "This biography rescues Sargent....from the shadows of his famous subjects." (United Press International)AUTHORBIO: 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.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312275285
• ISBN 13: 9780312275280
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 310