John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) was the son of an American doctor and was born in Florence. He studied painting in Italy and France, and in 1884 caused a sensation at the Paris Salon with his painting of Madame Gautreau. The scandal caused Sargent to move to England, where he subsequently established himself as the country's leading portrait painter. He made several visits to the United States where, as well as portraits, he worked on a series of decorative paintings for public buildings such as the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts.
Bringing together remarkable loans, some rarely exhibited, from galleries and private collections in Europe and America, the exhibition will follow Sargent's time in Paris, London and Boston as well as his travels in the Italian and English countryside. Musée Rodin, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Musée d’Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are amongst the institutions that are lending works.
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Group with Parasols (Siesta) (detail), ca. 1905. Oil on canvas. Private Collection
Curator Richard Ormond CBE says: 'Sargent's enthusiasms were all for things new and exciting. He was a fearless advocate of the work of younger artists, and in music his influence on behalf of modern composers and musicians ranged far and wide. The aim of this exhibition is to challenge the conventional view of Sargent. As a painter he is well known; but Sargent the intellectual, the connoisseur of music, the literary polymath, is something new.'
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends is organized in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will tour to in June 2015. Richard Ormond CBE has curated the exhibition with advice from Barbara Weinberg, an accomplished Sargent scholar and formerly the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
John Singer Sargent, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy 1907. Oil on canvas, Friends of American Art Collection. Art Institute of Chicago
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