Beyond Beauty by Devon Cox

Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent

By Devon Cox

WW Norton 2026

Devon Cox visited hundreds of archives and scrutinized heaps of primary records in preparation for his new book Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent (readers will largely have to take his word for it, since the book inexcusably includes no bibliography). Sargent is described by him as the premiere artist of the Gilded Age, and what Cox found after all this research was something of a revelation:

From this reappraisal, a more complex and nuanced version of him soon began to emerge from the shadow of history. The stolid, severe, two-dimensional man was replaced with a sensitive, cerebral, flesh-and-blood man, an ambitious, wickedly funny, occasionally mischievous, modern aesthete and outsider with an insatiable curiosity, irrevocably drawn to the ‘bizarre and outlandish’ with an ‘unavowed love of rare kinds of beauty’ and for ‘incredible types of elegance,’ a man with a daring rebel spirit and antiestablishment sentiments, who harboured a fascination for criminology and the underworld; a man preoccupied with sin and salvation, who even as a child reading Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, found sympathy with the great rebel Satan, whom he considered an ‘altogether different character from what we sinners imagine.’

Quite apart from the occasionally appalling prose and whimsical punctuation, this may be the standing world’s record for the largest number of euphemisms crammed into a single paragraph of normal length. What Cox means is: Sargent was gay. Sargent might have taken pains to obscure that fact when painting socialite swells in Boston (although he was considerably less careful when cruising the demimonde of Venice), but it was never an impenetrable obscurity (the lascivious nudes of young men being something of a giveaway), and it would be a stretch to characterize it as an overriding categorization. But at least it underpins the freshness of Cox’s account, which is more up-to-date than Stanley Olsen’s life from a quarter-century ago and more energetic than Paul Fisher’s account of the painter from 2022.

The writing doesn’t get much better throughout, alas. When he’s writing about Sargent’s art world debut in 1880 at Boston’s St. Botolph Club, for instance, Cox seems actually anxious to work in as many cliches as possible:

It was the perfect venue for Sargent to stage his first solo exhibition. He needed to make a splash to draw the attention of wealthy and fashionable Bostonians, who would be his prospective patrons. He pulled out all the stops and diligently cherry-picked his very best work to showcase his broad talent.

But mostly, this life of Sargent is less concerned with wine and roses and more with whine and poses. Once Sargent’s brilliant society portraits made his professional repute and began floating a thoroughly comfortable lifestyle, he began complaining about those portraits and denigrating them as rote soulless exercises, burdensome obligations he undertook with maximum eye-rolling. Throughout the latter half of the book, these portraits are unflatteringly contrasted with the more impressionistic work he did on his own initiative. “For Sargent,” writes Cox, “the watercolours were intended to ‘keep up my morale’ and ‘console me from the rotten stuff I am doing.’” The prospect of trudging back to portraiture work was, Cox writes, “a nightmare.”

Sargent managed to complain even about commissioned work that had nothing to do with painting flattering portraits of Lord and Lady So-and-So, constantly griping about “the damned picture that is expected of me,” regardless of what the damned picture in question happened to be. When living in a gorgeous suite of rooms at Boston’s legendary Copley Plaza, he moans about the “dreary regularity” of his sumptuous catered meals and laments the prospect of spending a summer in “this empty town.”  It’s a portrait of the artist as insufferable kvetch.

Even so, it’s all undeniably entertaining. Sargent’s portraits stand in their vibrant, chatty beauty well apart from the pampered little popinjay who produced them, and the fact that a distinctly different Sargent emerges from each new biography is an amusement so fitting for a portrait painter that it almost feels contrived.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News