A lush new volume devoted to the best works by beloved American Impressionist and portraitist John Singer Sargent, whose dazzling use of light and color depicts modern subjects with arresting intimacy. An ideal introduction to the painter’s work, Sargent: The Masterworks features 100 of his most beloved paintings. Illustrating all aspects of his diverse oeuvre—portraits, landscapes, mural commissions—in oil and watercolor, this handsome new book includes works from both private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s infamous Madame X. Author Stephanie L. Herdrich draws on a wealth of new research to provide both an essential overview and a more nuanced understanding of the great American painter. Richly illustrated, the book’s three chapters cover the artist’s career from his childhood and early years in Paris, to his mid-career portraits made in England and United States, and his later years painting out of doors. An illustrated chronology contains fascinating details and archival imagery about the artist’s life. Sargent’s cosmopolitan upbringing and education made him perfectly suited to capture the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie and aristocrats of his era, creating sensual portraits that depict his sitters with startling vibrancy. Though he achieved tremendous success in portraiture, Sargent focused on painting outdoors after 1900, achieving the most brilliant and personal images of his career. One of the greatest portraitists and watercolorists of his time, Sargent remains one of the most well-known and well-loved of all American artists.

"The Museum's collection illuminates all aspects of Sargent's career. The drawings and watercolors in particular reflect his activity outside the portrait studio: his sojourns in Spain, Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, and in the Middle East; his enduring fascination with Venice; his holidays in the Italian lake district and the Alps; his tours of North America, including Florida and the Rocky Mountains; his visit as an official war artist to the western front in 1918; and his work as a muralist at the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University's Widener Library."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career. Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.

In 1874, eighteen-year-old American artist John Singer Sargent went to Paris to become a painter. Ten years later, he would become an art-world sensation when he sparked controversy with his scandalous portrait Madame X at the 1884 Salon. Sargent and Paris focuses on this decisive early decade in the artist’s career, when he first achieved recognition for ambitious portraits and bold canvases that pushed the boundaries of convention. Eight incisive essays by the world’s foremost Sargent scholars explore his life in Paris—then the epicenter of the cultural world—and the cosmopolitan circle of artists, writers, and cultivated patrons that nurtured his career and helped forge his artistic identity. Authors highlight the painter’s connections to giants of the Parisian art scene as well as the influential patrons who were key to Sargent’s progression as an artist. Presented alongside lavish images of more than a hundred paintings and works on paper—brought together from public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe—this publication offers an intimate look at the roots of Sargent’s signature, breathtaking style and his indelible experiences as a young artist in the French capital.

Thomas Hart Benton is often recognized as the leader of the 1930s movement known as Regionalism, which celebrated rural life in the United States. However, he lived and worked primarily in New York from 1912 to 1935, one of the most vibrant and dynamic periods in the city’s history. It was also a critical time for Benton’s artistic development, as he gradually established and set on the course that would define his career, one characterized by a passionate commitment to public art, populist subject matter, and a distinctively expressive figurative style rooted predominantly in European Mannerism. The pinnacle of Benton’s New York years was the mural cycle he painted for the newly erected headquarters of the New School for Social Research at 66 West 12th Street, which opened to the public in January 1931. Called America Today, the mural — his first significant commission for an institution — raised Benton’s artistic stature not only in New York, but also nationwide, setting the stage for his appearance in December 1934 on the cover of Time magazine, the first time an artist was accorded that honor. This Bulletin reveals the many remarkable stories that America Today has to tell and presents new discoveries about Benton’s epic cycle. The essay and entries contained in these pages elucidate the mural’s rich content, particularly Benton’s celebration of the Machine Age and American “progress” in the 1920s.

The Museum's collection illuminates all aspects of Sargent's career. The drawings and watercolors in particular reflect his activity outside the portrait studio: his sojourns in Spain, Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa, and in the Middle East; his enduring fascination with Venice; his holidays in the Italian lake district and the Alps; his tours of North America, including Florida and the Rocky Mountains; his visit as an official war artist to the western front in 1918; and his work as a muralist at the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University's Widener Library.

Explores more than 70 Impressionist and Realist paintings from the Metropolitan's collection. It presents works by some of America's foremost artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Whistler, Sargent, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, and Mary Cassatt.

A lavish exploration of Sargent's relationship to fashion, featuring exquisite costumes from the Gilded Age "The coat is the picture," John Singer Sargent explained to his fellow artist Graham Robertson in the summer of 1894, tugging a heavy garment ever more tightly around his sitter's slender figure. More attentive to what he hoped to accomplish as a painter than he was to the dictates of contemporary fashion, Sargent often chose what his sitters would wear. Even when they came to him dressed in the latest mode, he frequently ignored or simplified the details, concentrating on texture, drape and the way fabrics responded to light. Exploiting dress as an integral ingredient of his own artistry, Sargent used clothes to proclaim his own aesthetic agenda while simultaneously establishing his sitters' social position, profession, gender identity and nationality. Fashioned by Sargent explores the complicated relationship of painting and dress through lavish reproductions of Sargent's works alongside exquisite costumes of the period--including garments actually worn by his sitters. Essays by leading scholars illuminate topics such as portraits and performance, gender expression and the New Woman, and the pull of history and the excitement of new ideas, offering readers new insights into masterworks by a beloved American artist. The international art star of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was born in Italy to American parents, trained in Paris and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. Sargent is best known for his dramatic and stylish portraits, but he was equally active as a landscapist, muralist and watercolor painter.