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

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Carol Troyen

1 World [New York City], November 8, 1925.

2 See Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 342-343. The installation of such an elaborate decorative program in an art museum was not unique to Boston. A few years earlier the Art Institute of Chicago had contemplated an ambitious cycle of paintings and bas-reliefs for its staircase and dome - a project that was never carried out.

3 For a thorough discussion of Sargent's murals in the library see Sally Promey, "Sargent's Truncated Triumph: Art and Religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925," Art Bulletin, vol. 79 (June 1997), pp. 212-250.

4 Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, vol. 1, p. 343.

5 Although this seems a large sum, Sargent asked for, and received, fifteen thousand dollars for his portrait of John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937) that same year (in a private collection). See Trevor J. Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent and America (Garland Publishing, New York, 1986), p. 337.

6 According to Richard Ormond, Sargent "took early retirement" as a portraitist less because he was tired of the genre or had achieved financial independence than because "there were other things he more urgently wanted to paint" ("Sargent's Art," in John Singer Sargent, ed. Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond [Tate Gallery Publishing, London, and Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1998], p. 38).

7 See Mary Crawford Volk, "Sargent in Public: On the Boston Murals," in John Singer Sargent, ed. Kilmurray and Ormond, pp. 45-58.

8 Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 1921.

9 "Notes," Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, vol. 23 (October 1925), p. 63. In a process called marouflage both the walls and the back of the huge canvases were coated with an adhesive, attached to one another, and held in place with many props until the glue dried. The process took several weeks and was considered so extraordinary that newspapers in Worcester, Springfield, and Boston published articles describing the installation.

10 The evolution of McKeller's features into Apollo's is discussed in Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1994), p. 136, which also contains a brief but illuminating commentary on Sargent's career as a muralist.

11 Fox was a loyal preserver of Sargent's memory. He organized an exhibition of his sketches for the murals and arranged that many of them should enter museum collections. Fox was responsible for the photographic documentation of the murals during their long and complex evolution. He also wrote descriptions of them and appreciations of Sargent that are among the papers of John Singer Sargent and Thomas A. Fox, 1882-1932, in the Boston Athenaeum.

12 "The Making of a Decoration" (1916), p. 16, papers of John Singer Sargent and Thomas A. Fox, 1882-1932.

13 Needing a fourth group and finding nothing suitable in his mental repository of classical subjects, Sargent created an elegant ballet of three entwined figures. He later reportedly said that they had no identity other than "three blokes dancing" (quoted in Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography [1955; W. W. Norton, New York, 1969], p. 380).