Search Results

“... the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John SingerSargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant crowd-dazzler and populariser; like ...”

“... Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John SingerSargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a series of surrogate ...”

“... to her reputation as a great beauty. Certainly, it is not a flattering portrait, of the kind that John SingerSargent was producing for a satisfied clientèle. If we compare it to a slightly later Sargent portrait – Lady Agnew, for example – we find the pose of Cassatt’s ...”

“... John SingerSargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John SingerSargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length ...”

“... merely quaint. His legacy hasn’t worn well. Compared with his closest American contemporaries, John SingerSargent (also working in England), Thomas Eakins (determinedly homebound) and Mary Cassatt (moving between France and America), Whistler seems lightweight. He possessed neither ...”

“... cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John SingerSargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the aftermath of ...”

“... with help from his father, his own farm on Staten Island. He visited his younger brother, John, at Yale, making friends with some of his high-minded circle, including Charles Loring Brace, who later founded the Children’s Aid Society. Brace and the Olmsted brothers travelled to Europe in 1850, walking through the English countryside and visiting ...”

“... always took around with him. (At one point he could eat only Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John SingerSargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. He attracted neither the adoration nor ...”

“... were indigenous, not borrowed from the Old World. At the turn of the century, on the other hand, John SingerSargent had been a transatlantically renowned American painter with avowedly European artistic roots. Gorky admired his work – he even claimed to possess one of Sargent’s ...”

“... by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John SingerSargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John SingerSargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian ...”

“... awareness there was of this development is clear from the fascinating pamphlets published by John Snare, an antiquarian bookseller who was convinced that he had found Velázquez’s portrait of the future King Charles I of England, made in Madrid in 1623. In the course of legal action in 1851 concerning the ownership of the picture, London picture ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... an unmistakable resemblance to Coward. Hall’s heroine Stephen Gordon (Radclyffe Hall was called John for most of her adult life) knows that Brockett, a playwright with soft white hands and an effeminate voice, is a man ‘who would never require more of her than she could give’. When they visit Versailles together he talks to her about Marie Antoinette ...”