The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World
By Paul Fisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2022

When embarking on Paul Fisher’s new book, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, it’s encouraging to recall the knowing excellence of Fisher’s 2008 book House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. There were no easy reductions in House of Wits; the often-freakish singularities of the James family were allowed to stand and breathe on their own. 

As the title indicated, a great deal of The Grand Affair is likewise concerned with singularities, this time in what Fisher gamely calls the “fraught personal life” of the great painter, especially one element of that fraught personal life in particular. “The labels that have been attached to Sargent over the past several decades – some convincing, some less convincing: ‘homosexual,’ ‘gay,’ ‘queer,’ ‘asexual,’ or even ‘closet heterosexual’ – have plucked Sargent from his own times and context,” Fisher contends. “Such labels have tended to curb rather than liberate the painter’s opulent complexities, which transcend simplistic categories and remain fused with his lived experiences.” 

When you’re writing a biography of as well-known a figure as Sargent, it’s never advisable to offhandedly characterize all previous such biographers as simplistic. This hardly applies, for instance, to Stanley Olson’s 1986 book John Singer Sargent: His Portrait, as Fisher himself must known well, given the number of times it crops up in his End Notes (you’ll have to take my word for that or else root through those End Notes like a pig digging around on the forest floor, since the book has no bibliography). And yet, this happens regularly throughout The Grand Affair, this worrying of terminology in order to describe – or rule out describing – what Fisher refers to as the tension between Sargent’s “longstanding inclinations for transgressive passion on the one hand and frosty respectability on the other.” 

This is an odd way of putting things, and not least because Sargent, one of the greatest and most-courted painters of his era, virtually never even attempted “frosty respectability” and never needed to. There’s also that persistent straining Fisher does over the subject of “transgressive passion.” True, terms like “gay” and “queer” have modern rings to them and feel somehow anachronistic when applied here. But Sargent was a man who was sexually attracted to other men; “transgressive passion” or “fraught personal life” is going the long way around the barn when “homosexual” works just fine. 

Likewise the laboring of how many of the people in Sargent’s life responded to what they knew perfectly well. In Fisher’s telling, the friend who gets it the worst in this regard is one of Sargent’s grandest patrons, Isabella Stewart Gardner. Fisher is probably right to say that she would have bridled at the aforementioned anachronistic labels. “She may not have have had the kind of tolerant postmodern consciousness some have ascribed to her, even if, with the many colorful artists she cultivated, she did deal with many unconventional men whose secrets she seemed willing to keep, or ignore,” Fisher writes, adding: “She was happy to accommodate transgressions as long as they reflected well on her.”

One need not be a bought creature of Mrs. Gardner (any remaining such creatures would be in their fifteenth decade by now) to find that last crack pretty low. Mrs. Gardner enthusiastically opened the doors of her many houses to “unconventional” (again, homosexual) men. How many assignations took place in those rooms, with her full knowledge? How many of their secrets did she take to her grave, this woman who died keeping more secrets than a Pope in Rome? If Fisher knows of an example where she dropped (or worse, exposed) a man because his “transgressions” stopped reflecting well on her, he should produce his documentation or bury it in his End Notes. Sometimes an ally is just an ally. 

Fortunately, when Fisher isn’t wrestling with fraught terminology quibbles, he’s delivering on the “in his world” part of his book’s subtitle. Throughout The Grand Affair, he takes his readers deep into the creation of several of Sargent’s paintings. Fisher is uniformly excellent at describing what’s going on in those paintings – which is usually quite a bit, despite the reflexive dismissals that nettled Sargent in his own time and have dogged critical assessments of his work ever since. When Sargent returned to Venice (and its transgressive gondoliers) in the 1880s, much of his artwork reflected the ensuing broadening of the senses – and Fisher describes it all wonderfully, although he can’t resist a parting touch of melodrama, as when he writes about A Venetian Interior:

Nearby, a little boy strained to pour wine into a white ceramic cup, adding an odd, sweet touch of innocence and precocity. Sargent’s whole sepia-colored wine shop was hung with pots and bottles, suggested and quickly brushed in with Sargent’s spontaneous, sure watercolor technique, by which he was also delineating, in other studies, the great marble monuments of Venice. This genre piece captured a social milieu diametrical to the solemn, museum-like interiors of the Anglo-American palazzi where Sargent slept and dined when not roaming the back canals, calli, and campielli of the maritime city.

Fisher’s Sargent spends so much time roaming back canals, back alleys, and back dance halls that readers will start to wonder where he found the time to sketch and paint all those beautiful naked men. It adds an element of breathless scandal to a volume already afflicted with heavy breathing, but there’s no denying its entertainment value. The Grand Affair is a fluid, sparkling, entertaining book along just such lines. It makes Olson’s Sargent biography look downright staid – although not simplistic.

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 writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.