Sargent's women : four lives behind the canvas /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The fascinating backstories of four women painted by John Singer Sargent come alive in this seductive, multilayered biography.

With unprecedented access to newly discovered sources, Donna M. Lucey illuminates the lives of four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny clairvoyance, Sargent's portraits hint at the mysteries, passions, and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects' lives. Sequestered in a fantasy-land castle in the remote Rocky Mountains, Elsie Palmer carried on a labyrinthine love life; Elizabeth Chanler stepped into a maze of infidelity with her best friend's husband; as the veiled image of Sally Fairchild--beautiful, commanding, and poison-tongued--emerged on Sargent's canvas, the power of his artistry lured her sister Lucia into an ill-fated life in art; shrewd, iron-willed Isabella Stewart Gardner collected both art and young men. Born to unimaginable wealth, these women lived on an operatic scale, and their letters and diaries create a rich depiction of the Gilded Age and the acclaimed but secretive painter whose canvases defined the era.
8 pages of color illustrations

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction: Four Women. Four Lives. Four Paintings. (p. xiii)
• Chapter 1 The Pilgrim (p. 1)
• Chapter 2 The Sorcerer's Apprentice (p. 54)
• Chapter 3 The Madonna (p. 118)
• Chapter 4 The Collector (p. 176)
• Epilogue: The Curtain Closes (p. 245)
• Acknowledgments (p. 247)
• Notes (p. 251)
• Index (p. 299)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

How many of us wonder about the lives behind the faces in portraits? What were they like? Lucey (Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age) wondered the same thing, and thanks to her excellent research and narrative, we learn about four of the subjects immortalized by the great portraiture artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Along the way, we get glimpses into his life as well. From a Colorado heiress to a Bostonian legend, these women, often in their own voices through their correspondence, are introduced to listeners. Narrator Elizabeth Wiley has a wonderfully melodic voice, and she manages to distinguish the different personae throughout the book in a distinctive manner, but one that is not distracting. The author/narrator combination provides nonfiction storytelling at a high level, keeping the listener's interest throughout the nearly 11-hour program. Verdict Highly recommended for medium and large libraries and small libraries with a strong arts readership. ["Will be a lasting addition to academic and arts collections": LJ 5/15/17 starred review of the Norton hc.]-Gretchen Pruett, New Braunfels P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Lucey's fascination with the Gilded Age did not end with the completion of her best-selling Archie and Amélie (2006); it intensified as she considered the work of John Singer Sargent, a painter of uncanny insight whom she views as possibly his era's greatest chronicler. 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. Archie Chanler's sister Elizabeth was 27 when Singer painted her in 1893, capturing the banked fury and passion of this kind and dignified woman, who seemed destined for spinsterhood until she embarked on a life-altering affair with her best friend's husband. Elisa Palmer was another underestimated poor-little-rich-girl navigating a complicated life. Boston Brahmin Lucia Fairchild worshipped Sargent, became an artist, and supported her feckless husband while she struggled with multiple sclerosis. Lucey's portrait of mercurial and brazen Isabella Stewart Gardner, the best known of the quartet, is as fresh and revelatory as Sargent's scandalous painting as she recounts Gardner's zeal for art collecting and her unique home museum. Lucey's superlative group portrait, rendered in crystal-clear prose, is spring-fed by her immersion in vast archives of letters and diaries, her pilgrimages to the extraordinary places that shaped her subjects' lives, and her keen insights into what drove these women to break out of their gilded cages.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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 Amlie: 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 marrythe 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 collectionincluding Sargent's workin her own museum. Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

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.