Description

A great American artist John Singer Sargent is an abiding enigma He scandalized viewers 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 portraitpainting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themesand on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself

In The Grand Affair scholar Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the artist and his work Sargents nervy edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sittersfeelings that London Paris and New York high society was fascinated by yet kept at bay Fisher traces Singers life from his wandering transEuropean childhood to the salons of Paris and the scandals and enthusiasms he elicited and on to London where he mixed with other aristocrats and eccentrics and formed a close relationship with a boxer who became his model valet and traveling partner

Relating Sargents restless itinerary Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de sicle sexuality and art fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life