{"product_id":"the-grand-affair-john-singer-sargent-in-his-world","title":"The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World","description":"\u003cp\u003eA Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year  Long-listed for the Plutarch Award  A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent  stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic  fin de sicle culture he inhabited.  A great American artist  John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona  he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money  but he reserved 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 themesand on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself.  In The Grand Affair  the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargents nervy  edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sittersfeelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singers life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris  and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused  and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats  and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde  while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model  valet  and traveling partner. In later years  Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world 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 Sargents most daring and powerful work.  Illuminating 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44945857577013,"sku":"ByrdShop_0374165971","price":37.88,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780374165970.jpg?v=1769912017","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-grand-affair-john-singer-sargent-in-his-world","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}