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Start giftingThe Grand Affair
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Learn moreA 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 portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and 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. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that London, Paris, and New York high society was fascinated by yet kept at bay. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European 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 Sargent's restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.
Paul Fisher is a professor of American studies at Wellesley College and the author of House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family and Artful Itineraries: European Art and American Careers in High Culture, 1865-1920. He helped organize the Gardner Museum's pathbreaking 2020 exhibit Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, and contributed to the exhibition catalog, which won the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for the best art history publication in 2020.
David de Vries can be seen in a number of feature films, including The Founder, The Accountant, Captain America: Civil War, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. On television, his credits include House of Cards, Nashville, Halt and Catch Fire, the National Geographic film Killing Reagan, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for HBO. As a veteran stage actor, David appeared as Lumiere in Disney's Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, as Dr. Dillamond in the Los Angeles and Chicago companies of Wicked, and in hundreds of shows in regional theaters throughout the country. He is an Audie and Odyssey Award-winning narrator for his performance in Pam Munoz Ryan's Echo and has voiced over 100 titles in every genre, including his Audie Award-nominated performance of the 2011 Caldecott winner A Sick Day for Amos McGee.