Description

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The classic monograph on a much-loved artist—reissued in a spectacular oversize format

“Fascinating and lucid . . . a stunningly illustrated and illuminating life of a singular painter.” —Sue Roe, Wall Street Journal

In the early work of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Henry James saw “the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” Sargent’s talent, nay, genius was indeed uncanny, sustained with equal intensity through his famed society portraits, like the scandalous Madame X; his full-size showpieces, like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit; his thousands of watercolors executed en plein air from Venice to Corfu to Maine to Montana; and his ambitious mural decorations for the public monuments of Boston.

In Carter Ratcliff, Sargent has found a biographer and critic of fitting style and subtlety. Ratcliff expertly evokes the expatriate American milieu into which the artist was born, and offers penetrating insights into every phase of his career and every aspect of his work. Now, for the first time, this landmark monograph is offered in a special oversize format, with all of its 310 illustrations reproduced in full color, many at full-page size. It also includes a new preface by the author and an updated bibliography.

About the Author

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Carter Ratcliff is a poet, art critic, and contributing editor of Art in America. His books on art include The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art; Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art; and monographs on Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gilbert & George, and others. He has also published numerous volumes of poetry and a novel, Tequila Mockingbird.

Praise For…

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Not just another art history book, no title in recent memory recalls with such exactitude the style of an era that, in retrospect, has become increasingly golden. . . . The book and its prose shimmer.
— New York Times

Never before have Sargent’s talents been so gloriously displayed as they are here. Quite simply, this Abbeville edition is a stunner, a book as satisfyingly extravagant as a Sargent portrait.
— Christian Science Monitor

The spontaneity, elegance, and grace that characterize Sargent’s work are everywhere evident on these large, luminous pages. . . . A visual delight, well written.
— Art and Antiques