The Grand Affair

John Singer Sargent in His World

The Grand Affair
Paul Fisher
RRP:
NZ$ 83.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 71.39
Hardback
h229 x 152mm - 496pg
1 Nov 2022
International import eta 7-19 days
9780374165970
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
A bold new biography of legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siecleculture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. He charmed the possessors of new money and old, while reserving his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes--and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. In The Grand Affair, the scholar Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent' s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters--feelings that London, Paris, and New York high society was fascinated by yet kept at bay. Where did these feelings come from and how did they drive his art? Fisher traces Singer' s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he elicited, and on to London, where he mixed with Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and other aristocrats and eccentrics, and formed a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, he journeyed around the world with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent' s most daring and powerful work. Relating Sargent' s restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siecle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
"In this masterful biography, Paul Fisher reveals the rich and shadowy truths at the heart of John Singer Sargent' s life, while also offering a stunning reassessment of the famous painter' s work. Sargent, we learn, was far more than a polished society artist--he was a bold seeker who was impatient with rules and struggled to free himself from the constraints of his world, from racism to restrictive gender roles. A thrill to read, The Grand Affair is entirely absorbing--suspenseful, witty, poignant, and gripping. " --Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws, winner of the National Book Critics Circle award in biography, and distinguished professor of English at Endicott CollegeAlready an adept biographer, Paul Fisher has found his subject in John Singer Sargent, just as the fortunate Sargent has acquired his ablest chronicler to date. Replete with fresh critical assessments, The Grand Affair treats readers not only to a total immersion in the cosmopolitan swirl of Sargent' s circles of aesthetic and social affinity, but also to the rare enchantment that takes hold in the best biographies, when writer and subject are perfectly matched. --Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for BreakfastThe Grand Affair is enthralling. Sweeping in scope and startling in detail, it is a dazzling recreation and reevaluation of Sargent' s life and artistic vision. This book brilliantly displays and interrogates the underlying homoeroticism not only of Sargent' s work, but of late 19th and early 20th century art. This is the in-depth study of Sargent--and his world--for which art historians and scholars of gender and sexuality have been waiting. --Michael Bronski, professor at Harvard University and author of A Queer History of the United StatesJohn Singer Sargent has long been seen as a ' society artist, ' a sumptuously gifted painter who flattered the rich and famous, and was out of step, stylistically and temperamentally, with the edgier art of the Impressionists and their followers. In The Grand Affair, Paul Fisher blows these prejudices to pieces. Sargent was every bit as adventurous as his most advanced contemporaries, Fisher argues, though in ways that have been, for various reasons (some prudish, some academic), obscured for over a century. He gives us an intimate tour inside the ambiguous world of Sargent' s studio, with its exotic costumes and elaborate, gender-bending roleplay. Seemingly indifferent to the erotic charms of women, Sargent painted his female models, his ' divas, ' with a marvelous sense of eruptive power. Fisher argues, convincingly, that these portraits, like the drop-dead fabulous Madame X, were in fact self-portraits of a sort--' transgressive and independent in a way that he couldn' t be himself. ' Fisher seamlessly weaves together biography, social history, art history, aesthetic theory, and gossip. This is a dazzling book. --Christopher Benfey, author of Degas in New Orleans. The Grand Affair is a splendidly readable, fast-paced biography replete with fascinating details. This book is both an insightful psychological study and a vivid panorama of the many places Sargent called home. --Christina Thompson, author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia and editor of the Harvard Review
Paul Fisher is a professor of American studies at Wellesley College and the author of House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family and Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920. He helped organize the Gardner Museum' s pathbreaking 2020 exhibit Boston' s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, and contributed to the exhibition catalog, which won the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for the best art history publication in 2020.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780374165970
Published: 1 Nov 2022
Published In:
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Format: Hardback
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 454g
Pages: 496

In stock - for items in stock we aim to dispatch the next business day. For delivery in NZ allow 2-5 business days, with rural taking a wee bit longer.

Locally sourced in NZ - stock comes from a NZ supplier with an approximate delivery of 7-15 business days.

International Imports - stock is imported into NZ, depending on air or sea shipping option from the international supplier stock can take 10-30 working days to arrive into NZ. 

Pre-order Titles - delivery will vary depending on where the title is published, if local stock is available in NZ then 5-7 business days, for international imports it can be 10-30 business days. In all cases we will access the quickest supply option.

Delivery Packaging - we ship all items in cardboard sleeves or by box with either packing paper or corn starch chips. (We avoid using plastics bubble bags)

Tracking - Orders are delivered by track and trace courier and are fully insured, tracking information will be sent by email once dispatched.

View our full Order & Delivery information