Was john singer sargent gay

You know everything.

TF: The scholars don’t know. … He was very fond of music, played the piano and was a confirmed concertgoer.” In 1926 Percy Grainger, the piano prodigy and composer, wrote a short appreciation in which he warmly commended Sargent’s “inscrutability in all that touched his purely personal life.” (Grainger understood discretion, for he pursued masochism with female partners.)

Sargent’s long reign as an establishment figure merited grand memorial exhibitions in Boston, New York, and London.

The piece argued that the radiance and bravura of these works manifested the pleasure the artist took in observing and depicting the manliness of subjects from London’s Italian enclave. Nonetheless, the writer had doubts when two colleagues promptly requested to option it for a film: “I simply did not think this story could be a film: it was too sexually explicit for presumed mainstream tastes, the general topic of homophobia was a hot potato unless gingerly skirted, and, given Hollywood actors’ reluctance to play gay men (though many gay men have brilliantly played straight guys) it would likely be difficult to find a good cast, not to say a director.” Proulx made those comments after Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain premiered at the 2005 Venice International Film Festival and won the Golden Lion Award for best picture.

In 1979 he and James Lomax co-curated the first large international loan exhibition: John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian Age opened in Leeds and traveled to London and Detroit. In the same 1927 letter, Bell noted that Sargent’s “sexual life” was widely discussed by his friends in the so-called Bloomsbury set.

In 2000 I organized a project at the Seattle Art Museum titled John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist.

Career

Sargent was considered the leading portrait painter of his generation.^[1][2] During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His brief but telling analysis of Sargent’s drawings of the African-American Thomas E.

McKeller is particularly interesting.” Four years later, Richard Ormond dismissed and discouraged the discussion of Sargent’s sexuality:

The record is not clear. Left: Sargent, Albert de Belleroche (c. The catalogue included my essay titled “The Complications of Being Sargent.” It quoted a letter written by the art critic Clive Bell in 1927 in which he described a luncheon at which the French portraitist Jacques-Émile Blanche insisted that Sargent had been “notorious” in Paris and Venice for his homosexual exploits.

The catalogue for the exhibition Fashioned by Sargent (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2023) conceded the topic by noting “the much debated and unresolved question of Sargent’s (homo)sexuality.” It also referred to “the homosexual and homosocial circles in which he often moved.” This year – the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death – New York’s Metropolitan Museum gave some limelight to a few early oil sketches of sexy men in its exhibition Sargent and Paris.

[He had] none of the petty preciousness displayed among oversophisticated intellects.” Most reviewers deemed Mount’s claims overly admiring. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche declared that “Sargent’s gay sex life in Paris and Venice was positively scandalous. The main exception concerned a bust-length painting of Parisian art student Albert de Belleroche in 16th-century costume.

Alas, the wall texts did little to help viewers fathom the sensual display. One section presented all the drawings from the album of male figure studies acquired by Harvard in 1937 in concert with the painting Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller (1917-20, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Polite society in Sargent’s day was wary of close attachments between men and urged matrimony as an advantageous imperative, even when it was a marriage of convenience.

Sargent painted Blanche in the late 1880s and they remained in professional contact; moreover, Blanche was a closeted homosexual who married a childhood friend five months after Wilde was jailed. The answer is that we simply do not know, and decoding messages from his work is no substitute for evidence.

The statement appeared in the catalogue for the landmark exhibition John Singer Sargent, which opened at London’s Tate Gallery in 1998, then traveled to Washington, D.C., and Boston.