Was john singer sargent gay
Home / gay topics / Was john singer sargent gay
Career
Sargent was considered the leading portrait painter of his generation.[1][2] During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His first contribution to The Arts Fuse was “Boston and Sargent, For Better, For Worse” (December 31, 2023).
A “confirmed bachelor” like his close friend Henry James, Sargent was Oscar Wilde’s neighbor for a time and lived under the shadow of Wilde’s trials, which established the emergence of the homosexual identity, closely associated with artists, and new laws that broadened the criminalization of gay activities.
Sargent navigated his public persona as a shrewd pas de deux between revealing and concealing.
In a recent interview, his great-niece suggests that McKeller was suspected of being gay, and that’s why he left his native Wilmington, N.C., a city with an African-American majority, and moved to Boston. He was a secluded and inscrutable personality. It doesn’t relate to any of the murals, and he painted it at a time when he was rejecting portrait commissions.
Sargent’s only major nude, and one of the great portraits of his career, the painting would have caused a scandal had the model been white.
Sargent lovingly illuminates McKeller’s golden brown skin, his muscles, and his Adam’s apple, and captures his tilted head in a moment of ecstasy. Ormond, p. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Thomas E. McKeller modeled for the figure of Atlas.
In 1999 Norman Kleeblatt curated the exhibition John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family for the Jewish Museum, New York.
The accompanying label said the subject’s “chiseled features, angular jaw, and hooded eyes represented a type of beauty [Sargent] found appealing.” Then came a disclaimer that strategically bowed to the Tate’s 1998 dictum: “Sargent’s images of Belleroche have fueled speculation that their relationship was romantic, though Sargent was extremely private about his personal life and left no overt evidence of any liaisons.” The institutional voice chose not to “see” Sargent’s painting of Belleroche as a form of “evidence.” The work is, nonetheless, a considered visual statement made in response to the artist’s feelings for the man.
Trevor Fairbrother recently wrote an essay about Sargent for Donald Platt’s book-length poem Tender Voyeur, published by Grid Books.
The painting remained away from the public eye until Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts acquired it in 1986.
One of Sargent’s leading scholars, Trevor Fairbrother, has said that this painting confirmed his sense that Sargent was gay. Sargent experts indicate that what makes it even more striking is that the image has no mythical or narrative justification.
(Decades later I learned from a 2015 online report that a male nude by Galdi, formerly owned by Sargent, was in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection: in 1925 the artist’s sisters donated over 600 photographs from his estate; the Sargent connection fell from sight after the pictures were dispersed within the museum’s reference library.)
In October 1986 I escorted Andy Warhol and his assistant Benjamin Liu through the galleries of the Whitney Museum’s Sargent retrospective and recorded the conversation.
Stanley Olson, who wrote an authorized biography in 1986, portrayed him as a workaholic and a “full-blown enigma.” He declared, “No one who knew him well or slightly has ever been tempted to suggest anything whatever about his private life, which presents a major obstacle for any claim [of concealed homosexuality] which is advanced.” As will be seen, Olson was wrong.
Four decades later, viewing Sargent and his art through the lens of identity studies and LGBTQ history offers hope of new insights.
He championed my reading of Sargent’s drawings of male nudes, which he described as “openly erotic.” After stating that a “masked sensuality” and an “aura of performance” are aspects of Sargent’s personality as an artist, Tóibín suggested that an openness to the homosexual undercurrent in the work might “encourage us to look at the paintings … more subtly and carefully, and indeed may allow the work itself to yield much more.”
Left: Sargent’s McKeller on view at the MFA, Boston, 2025.
You know everything.
TF: The scholars don’t know. One section presented all the drawings from the album of male figure studies acquired by Harvard in 1937 in concert with the painting Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller (1917-20, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Photo pairing by author.
In 1965, Richard Ormond, Sargent’s great-nephew, characterized his kinsman as “reserved and austere.” Writing for The Saturday Book, the 26-year-old Englishman explained, “[Sargent] was only at ease with his family and close friends, detesting social occasions and the flattery of the fashionable world.
He was a large and strong man, with, if one knew him at all, enough indications of virility not to be taken for an example of the intellectualized homosexuality notable among artists in London. In 2016 The Royal Ballet, London, debuted Strapless (choreography by Christopher Wheeldon; score by Mark-Anthony Turnage). The ballet was inspired by Deborah Davis’s 2003 narrative nonfiction book Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X.
Sargent had personal associations with the French composer Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901) and Polignac's lover Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921). Art historian Deborah Davis suggests that Sargent's interest in women he considered exotic, Rosina Ferrara, Amélie Gautreau and Judith Gautier, was prompted by infatuation that transcended aesthetic appreciation.[5] The likelihood of an affair with Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose, is accepted by Sargent scholars.[6]
References
Partly based on a Wikipedia article.
It made the Wertheimer Family show the centerpiece of an idiosyncratic survey of the artist’s work.