Portrait of Sargent by Boldini
When I lived for a year in Boston (1972-73), I would spend hours wandering the galleries at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, with it's lovely collection of Sargent's. I would sit & wonder at his paintings & cruise the arty type guys. John Singer Sargent's work seem to attract like minded viewers.
The iconic full-length portrait of New Orleans beauty Virginie Gautreau (1884) brought Sargent notoriety. Considered brazen, the portrait of Madame Gautreau in a strapless black gown with a plunging neckline was savaged by the critics as scandalous. To escape the scandal created by the Portrait of Madame X, in 1886 Sargent moved to London, where his paintings triumphed at the Royal Academy & where he established a brilliant career as a society & celebrity portraitist, doing more than 700 portrait paintings.
He had many friends who were homosexual, including Henry James & Robert Louis Stevenson, & associated with aesthetes & dandies such as Oscar Wilde & Robert de Montesquiou. Sargent was known as distant & reserved. As far as we know, he had no great romantic attachments, only flirtations with women & deep friendships with men.
Portrait of Nicola d'Inverno
Rumors circulated about his relationship with his long time model & assistant Nicola d'Inverno, but no physical relationship has been documented. At his death, his family destroyed all of his personal papers, so the evidence for Sargent's homosexuality resides largely in his work, especially his genre paintings & male nudes. The Husband I & chanced on an exhibit of pencil sketches by Sargent at a small gallery at NYU in the late 1990s. I turned to the Husband (who knows his art history) & asked- “...was Sargent gay? I mean look at the love that went into these male nudes?” I like to think that he was gay. I am going to claim him as one of our own. His work certainly speaks to me.
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