John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes

by John Esten

Published on occasion of the major Sargent retrospective traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999, "John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes" brings to light a fascinating portion of Sargent's work long hidden from the public eye.
Beginning in his adolescence, and throughout his distinguished career, John Singer Sargent, the celebrated painter of patricians, produced a superbly rendered, uninhibited book of work that was rarely seen and never exhibited: the male nudes. Models were a significant aspect of the great painter's profession, whether they were commission-producing society "sitters" or professional models used as reference for his three Boston mural projects or works created for his private enjoyment--one young Italian model stayed in the artist's employ for nearly twenty-six years. Sargent's enduring subject was capturing the "human form divine" in portraits of the fashionable and famous and the absolute male.
Over the last century, these little-known works have been dispersed to museum archives and private collections throughout the United States and Great Britain. John Esten has unearthed the most extraordinary of these images, ranging from vibrant watercolors and oil paintings to charcoal studies, published here for the first time in a single volume.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History

80 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 1999

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, but interesting, especially given the fact that male nudes are so rare in art of this period.

I feel something about Sargent's work that I've never felt about any other artist, ever. I wouldn't consider myself an art lover, nor am I even particularly interested in art (at least for art's sake). But I could look at his painting and sketches for hours.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Singer Sargent is best known for his formal portrait work. Little do people know that John Singer Sargent was a life-long bachelor who painted male nudes.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book of the male nudes by Sargent, the pictures are mostly sketches or prelinary watercolours - they are incredibly evocative, especially his studies of WWI soldiers relaxing away from battle, swimming, sleeping in the sun etc. What Sargent could have created if he had not been hampered by the time he lived in can be seen in his 'Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller'.

It is fortunate we now live in times when the art of Sargent, not simply his nudes, is recognised and celebrated. He was a wonderful painter of portraits and although dismissed as a society painter the difference between his work and more meritricious practitioners like August John is so obvious as not need discussion. Paintings like 'Madam X' and 'Dr. Pozzi at Home' (often called 'The Man in the Red Coat') are not simply gorgeous to look at but have the acuity of Lely, Velasquez or Titian in the way he captures the character of his sitters and their time.

As for Sargent's nudes? do they show the artist as gay? queer? homosexual? Who knows? We can't know, but they show an artist who was unafraid to capture the beauty of the male form in all its erotic overtones. Looking at these male nudes is like looking at the nudes of Rubens, they are done by someone who loves that flesh. Does that make him gay or queer? I think only a queer artist could capture the tragic vulnerability of those naked soldiers he captured at rest and play so sympathetically. These are not stand-ins for heroic symbols atop a monument but the real fragile flesh of young men who, in all probability, would be dead or horribly injured. His young men are not symbols of 'heroic' youth, but real people.

This book is fascinating for the insights it gives of both prejudice but also how fashion and taste changed so rapidly after WWI. Sargent's heirs had trouble fulfilling his wish for these nudes to be donated to a major museum and this was only in part because they were male nudes. Many museums didn't think Sargent was going to be remembered or worth collecting.

A lovely book of images by a first rate artist.

[Matthew Hittinger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth it for the Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller, though its reproduction pales in comparison to the life-sized version in Boston's MFA.

[puppysquisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only a handful of the drawings are worth studying if you ask me, although thankfully the reproductions have enough clarity and tonal range to give any student plenty to work with, should that be what you're looking for. I find myself coming back to those few drawings with regularity because they are among the best I've come across.

[Abner Dwight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too damn short. Excellent plates.

"Like beauty, homoeroticism is in the eye of the beholder" - Esten

[Balya Sulistiyono · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like there should be more stories about Sargent’s fascination on the male bodies.