Sargent's murals for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - John Singer Sargent - Cover Story

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Carol Troyen

At the [signal], there came a rumbling from above. Suddenly the great cloths...fell away.... Through the gaping spaces shone the golden ochre and blue of [John Singer Sargent's] murals. The rumble continued and be cloths swayed and rose.... Through the ball and rotunda rose the peal of the bugle and the music of an orchestra joined the sound....For a moment, the crowd was silent and then whispers rose and whispers deepened and became a murmuring that grew into a broad, full voice.

Thus wrote a reporter for the Boston Evening Transcript on November 1, 1925. The magical premiere of the murals Sargent created over the grand stairway at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Pl. I) also served as his requiem. He had died in London six months earlier, on the eve of setting sail for Boston to supervise the installation of the last of the murals - an ambitious program encompassing twenty paintings and eighteen bas-reliefs. These decorations were celebrated as "the last works of a tremendously brilliant and prolific career."(1) They were also the culmination of his more than thirty years as a designer of murals, all of which are in Boston.

The unveiling of the museum's murals was coupled with a memorial exhibition of more than three hundred works by Sargent, affording Bostonians a spectacular opportunity to pay tribute to their favorite painter. Three-quarters of a century later the murals and bas-reliefs have been carefully conserved, the stairwell and rotunda refurbished, and the most comprehensive exhibition of Sargent's works since 1925 has been assembled and will remain on view at the Museum of Fine Acts through September.

The exhibition John Singer Sargent, which has already been seen at the Tate Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., includes Sargent's grand portraits of celebrities of the Gilded Age and the Edwardian era, his sparkling landscapes and mysterious Venetian scenes, and his elegant watercolors and drawings. Related exhibitions in museums in the region continue the salute to Sargent. The Boston presentation of John Singer Sargent is further distinguished by the special emphasis placed on the artist's murals - a genre which Sargent considered the most challenging and significant in which he worked.

Bostonians' enthusiasm for Sargent dates to the autumn of 1887, when he first visited the city. He readily secured commissions to paint a number of its prominent citizens, including Mrs. Edward D. Boit (1846-1898), Mrs. Charles Inches (1861-1933), and, most famously, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Sargent's first one-man exhibition was held in Boston - at the St. Botolph Club in 1888. From that time on his work in all mediums and genres was eagerly collected in Boston.

Sargent's rise to prominence coincided with an artistic renaissance in Boston. Beginning about 1890, Symphony Hall, Horticultural Hall, an opera house, and the YMCA were all built along Huntington Avenue, the city's new cultural axis. In 1907 ground was broken there for a new building for the Museum of Fine Arts, to replace its overcrowded home in Copley square.

During the same years, the mural movement began to flower in the United States, and for nearly fifty years Boston was one of its principal centers. Among the first and best-known decorative programs was that executed in Trinity Church by John La Farge (1835-1910) between 1876 and 1878. Subsequently, murals were produced in a variety of styles and with varying degrees of originality for public buildings and private houses throughout the city. The chronicles of revolutionary Boston that Robert Reid (1862-1929) painted for the Massachusetts State House between 1901 and 1904 are straightforward illustrations. In the same years, William de Leftwich Dodge (18671935) adorned the lobby of the Majestic Theatre with frolicking nymphs in a light classical style. Alma Mater, painted in 1923 by Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936) for the student union of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, depicts a personification of the university enthroned amid figures representing academic subjects. By that time the beaux arts mural tradition of showing idealized young women in classical garb had become a rather fired formula. But Boston still gloried in the decorations in McKim, Mead and White's Public Library, which were begun in 1895 and included sculptures by Bela Lyon Pratt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Daniel Chester French, and murals by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Sargent.

Inevitably, the Museum of Fine Arts elected to carry on this tradition in its new neoclassical building, designed by the Paris-trained architect Guy Lowell (1870-1927). Its temple front proclaimed the institution's connection to what were then considered the most significant cultures of the past: ancient Greece and Rome and Renaissance Italy. It was assumed that the interior decorations would address similarly lofty themes.(2)

Equally inevitably, the museum turned to Sargent for those decorations. His Triumph of Religion in the Boston Public Library had been very well received,(3) and most of the museum's trustees were friends, relatives, or patrons of Sargent's.(4)