Renaissance Rome and Emersonian Boston: Michelangelo and Sargent, between triumph and doubt

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2002 by Shand-Tucci, Douglass

Established in the mid-nineteenth century by Harvard professors and State Street grandees to be, as its motto insists, "the light of all citizens," the library-an institution which to this day carefully cultivates a heritage both patrician and populist and in both cases gloriously elitist-began to build in 1888 the most spectacular of all Boston's (America's!) new institutional palaces. Designed by the leading American architects of the day, McKim, Mead, and White, it became a national model, a "people's palace" of splendid architectural art for which McKim sought (and mostly succeeded in attracting) the work of sculptors and painters of the first rank. Only the brightest light of many in the artistic firmament invited to hymn the library's splendor, Sargent responded to the call as the Bostonian he never disputed being, though he was for most of his life an expatriate living in Europe. Always proud, however, of his Puritan ancestry and prone frequently to refer to his "New England conscience," Sargent-though he did much of the library painting in England-actually lived for almost a quarter of his adult life in Boston; more than eight years, Promey estimates. His base of operations in the city from the 1880s to the 1920s was always its most prestigious quarter, the Back Bay; his home the fashionable Hotel Vendome on Commonwealth Avenue; the most often frequented of his clubs (the bohemian St. Botolph), a block away on Newbury Street, where also was one of the Back Bay studios he used over the years. (Another was on Exeter Street.) Even the industrial-- sized studio on Columbus Avenue in the nearby South End, which he found necessary for his huge library work, was only a few blocks from the heart of the Back Bay, Copley Square, to which Sargent himself moved in 1919 after the opening there of the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Here, in what had originally been called Art Square before its dedication to Boston's eighteenth-century counterpart to Sargent, John Singleton Copley, Bostonians by the 1880s and '90s were compassed on all sides by great institutions of church and state: the stately Museum of Natural History, since evolved into the Museum of Science, for example, and the towering new Old South Church, for another, whose institutional history reached back to 1776 and the planning of the Boston Tea Party. Daily, Sargent passed other equally grand landmarks of newer institutions, such as Harvard Medical School, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-a veritable New World acropolis. All three institutions, such a cradle of learning and culture did Copley Square become in the last decades of the nineteenth century, were to move in Sargent's own lifetime to vast white marble "city beautiful" campuses on the fringes of booming intown Boston, which meanwhile, however, seemed to press more and more closely around Copley Square's most eminent-and most permanent-architectural masterworks, still famously facing each other today: H. H. Richardson's Trinity Church, perhaps the greatest American building of the nineteenth century (certainly the first American architecture whose style was influential overseas) and McKim's grand public library.