Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas

by Donna M. Lucey

Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection

“[Lucey] delivers the goods, disclosing the unhappy or colorful lives that Sargent sometimes hinted at but didn’t spell out.”—Boston Globe

In this seductive, multilayered biography, based on original letters and diaries, Donna M. Lucey illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects’ lives. These women inhabited a rarefied world of wealth and strict conventions—yet all of them did something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356168
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/24/2018
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Donna M. Lucey is the author of the New York Times best-selling Archie and Amélie and other books, the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities grants, and a 2017 writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount. The media editor at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, she lives in Charlottesville.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Four Women. Four Lives. Four Paintings xiii

Chapter 1 The Pilgrim 1

Chapter 2 The Sorcerer's Apprentice 54

Chapter 3 The Madonna 118

Chapter 4 The Collector 176

Epilogue: The Curtain Closes 245

Acknowledgments 247

Notes 251

Index 299

Editorial Reviews

"In Donna M. Lucey’s deft hands, four John Singer Sargent portraits become portals to the Gilded Age. By delving into the lives of the heiresses he painted she brings us into their scintillating world. We watch as they travel the globe, twirl through ballrooms, make good or not-so-good marriages, embark on affairs—and pursue new careers in a time of changing roles for women."

Laura J. Snyder

"Sargent’s Women has a distinct elegance, energy, and potency—Lucey’s writing propels you forward, straight to the heart of the story, along the vibrant ties that linked this fascinating artist to the women he made infamous."

Christene Barberich

"Lucey champion[s] unconventional women… piecing together their intricate lost stories, and the stormy brew of scandal and repression that affected these women—and Sargent himself."

Elle - Estelle Tang

"Ingenious."

Times Literary Supplement - Frances Wilson

"[A] vivid adventure."

Antiques and the Arts Weekly

"[A] lyrical meditation on life, love, and art in the Gilded Age.… Sargent’s Women abounds with dazzling characters in atmospheric settings."

Wall Street Journal - Jane Kamensky

"Like characters from the writings of Edith Wharton, [these women] were smart, passionate, willful, adventurous and striking-looking.… Lucey’s prose is invitingly conversational and quick-flowing. Her character sketches are colorful and she is not, thank goodness, above conveying some wonderfully catty gossip."

Alexander C. Kafka

"Straight from the pages of a novel by Edith Wharton or Henry James."

The Times (London) - Michael Prodger

"Many penetrating insights into the studiously private Sargent."

Weekly Standard

"Lucey upends our assumption that elite women of the Gilded Age were confined to a limited domestic sphere. The four women she profiles were rule-breakers and worldly sophisticates who powered through extreme challenges imposed by family, social norms, and illness. Each was painted by Sargent, but Lucey's narrative portraits upstage even his brilliant renderings, revealing four not-to-be-denied women of strength and determination."

Elizabeth Broun

In Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas, [Lucey] does…more of what she does best, creating a rollicking snow globe version of an almost unimaginable world of wealth, crackpot notions of self-improvement and high-flying self-indulgence…woven around an often passionate commitment to, deep admiration for and wide-ranging pursuit of the fine and literary arts…Lucey is a persistent detective and a bemused, sometimes amused, storyteller, attentive to interesting, hilarious, disturbing detail…

The New York Times Book Review - Amy Bloom

06/05/2017
Lucey (Archie and Amélie) examines the fascinating lives of four women affiliated with the inimitable painter John Singer Sargent, “portraitist to New York’s Gilded set.” The women, three of whom appear in Sargent’s paintings, include Elsie Palmer, who was plucked from a cushy life of English aristocracy and forced to assimilate into the American West after her mother’s death, and Elizabeth Chanler, whose tragically misdiagnosed tuberculosis of the hip resulted in her being strapped to a board for two years as a teenager. Sargent painted Isabella Stewart Gardner twice, once in youth and once shortly before her death at age 82. In the years between, she amassed an incredible art collection that included a Vermeer and a Botticelli. Lucey goes a bit off script to focus on Lucia Fairchild, who never appeared in any of Sargent’s paintings (though her sister Sally did), but it is the right choice. Lucia’s life is endlessly intriguing. A working artist who lived in New Hampshire’s eccentric Cornish Arts Colony among luminaries such as sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and actress Ethel Barrymore, Fairchild led a successful career creating affordable miniature paintings to support her children and deadbeat husband. Oddly, there is little biographical information on Sargent himself, who remains something of an enigma throughout the book, though Lucey does analyze his artwork and his aesthetic choices. Still, Lucey ably pulls these four compelling women out of obscurity with insight and infectious enthusiasm. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Choosing four striking Sargent portraits of wealthy, cosmopolitan American women, Lucey vividly reveals the hidden truths of their tumultuous lives, while also succinctly telling the artist’s own intriguing story. . . . Lucey’s superlative group portrait, rendered in crystal-clear prose, is spring-fed by . . . her keen insights into what drove these women to break out of their gilded cages."

starred review Booklist

"[Lucey] delivers the goods, disclosing the unhappy or colorful lives that Sargent sometimes hinted at but didn’t spell out. . . . Sargent’s Women is a good read . . . [and its] chatty pleasures are considerable."

Boston Globe - Michael Upchurch

"In Sargent’s Women . . . [Lucey] does . . . what she does best, creating a rollicking snow globe version of an almost unimaginable world of wealth, crackpot notions of self-improvement and high-flying self-indulgence."

New York Times Book Review - Amy Bloom

★ 05/15/2017
American artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) gained fame for creating exceptional portraits, perceptively revealing the singular essence of each of his subjects on canvas. Lucey (Archie and Amélie) tells the vivid personal stories of four women Sargent depicted while simultaneously skillfully weaving in details about his life and art as well as his connections to these individuals, their families, and their notable friends and associates. The women came from society's upper reaches and led complex and often eccentric lives. Here are Sally Fairchild, Elsie Palmer, Elizabeth Chanler, and well-known collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. Each account is intriguing, especially that of the beautiful Fairchild, who eventually relinquishes the spotlight to her sister, Lucia Fairchild Fuller—a young woman so inspired by Sargent that she pursued a serious, lifelong painting career. Lucey's research is impressive and uses a wealth of varied original sources. Her narrative is engaging and elegant, set in a rich cultural and social framework that insightfully reflects the era. Selected portraits, photos, and helpful notes all enhance the text. VERDICT This skillfully written work with a unique creative perspective will attract readers interested in art and history and will be a lasting addition to academic and arts collections.—Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ

Library Journal

2017-05-01
Perceptive biographies of a quartet of Gilded Age women.During his long and fruitful career as a portraitist, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) counted among his opulent subjects four women embedded in the glittering, passionate, and sometimes-tawdry landscape of 19th-century high society. Drawing on much archival material, Lucey (Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, 2006, etc.) returns to themes of her last book, revealing love, madness, greed, and occasional triumph at a time when even wealth did not necessarily guarantee women independence. Sargent himself stands at the periphery of Lucey's engrossing stories, although he was handsome, dashing, and astonishingly productive. Portraiture supported him and his family, but toward the end of his career, he disdained the genre; he was tired, he said, of flattering his patrons. Lucey chose her subjects well: four women who responded in unexpected ways to the challenges that they faced. Elsie Palmer, daughter of a rich Colorado businessman, was destined to be the caretaker for her family until, at the age of 35, she courageously decided to marry—the only way, writes the author, that she could flee her father's "smothering demands." Lucia Fairchild was the sister of the beautiful Sally, subject of one of Sargent's most enigmatic portraits. Raised in "a cocoon of privilege, money, and influence," the Fairchild girls and their brothers saw their wealth vanish. Lucia managed through a combination of "talent and raw courage": encouraged by Sargent, she became an artist, working tirelessly to support her spendthrift husband and their children. The lovely heiress Elizabeth Chanler suffered from a hip infection that left her strapped to a portable bed for two years during adolescence. She fell in love, scandalously, with a friend's husband, the writer John Jay Chapman, and they married after his wife died suddenly. Isabella Stewart Gardner grew up a rebellious tomboy and never lost her willfulness and determination. She became the most prominent art collector of her time, leaving her collection—including Sargent's work—in her own museum. Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered.

Kirkus Reviews