Sargent's Women

📖 The Scoop

Sargent was surrounded by beautiful and remarkable women when he was a young man. He was closely involved with them, and he sought their company and chose them as friends and models. These women included not just fashionable society types and women from the arts and letters, but earthier women from less elevated social strata. His models in Capri, Spain, Tangier, Venice, and Paris were uniformly young and exotic, and this was not by chance. They excited him. His serial depictions of Rosina in Capri in 1878, his near-wanton dancers in Spain, the draped temptress inhaling incense in Tangier, and Gigia Vianni and the alluring demimondaines on the backstreets of Venice are all from a world that animated the young painter. His fascination with these unadorned lower-class women reveal as much about his identity as does his attraction to the more complicated likes of Amelie Gautreau, Judith Gautier, and Lily Millet. --Publisher description.

Genre: Art / Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions / General (fancy, right?)