Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends Details
Review "Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends unites informative essays by noted scholars with a wealth of imagery to offer fresh insights into Sargent’s life and work. The book also includes drawings, early works, a richly illustrated chronology, and new research, making it one of the most comprehensive volumes on this renowned American painter." -Artdaily.org"Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, written by Richard Ormond, one of the foremost authorities on the artist, showcases Sargent’s cosmopolitan career in a new light—through his bold portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, many of them his close friends—giving us a picture of the artist as an intellectual and connoisseur of the music, art, and literature of his day. . . . Accompanying [major exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and The Metropolitan Museum of Art], this is the first book devoted to the entire career of this renowned American painter through these brilliant portraits." -ArtFixdaily.com"Think Gilded Age, that glittering era of sophistication and new money at the end of the 19th century. John Singer Sargent painted and lived it. He cultivated commissions from its rich, and became famous for his luscious, flattering, society portraits, which is exactly what critics often held against him. And over time, the go-to portrait painter of his day lost interest in the grand paintings that made his name, preferring people in informal settings, and watercolors regarded as some of the finest ever painted. . . 90 years after his death, in 1925, it is those extraordinary, telling portraits that are treasured all over the world."-CBS NEWS Read more About the Author Richard Ormond is Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and coauthor, with Elaine Kilmurray, of the Sargent catalogue raisonné. Trevor Fairbrother is an independent art curator. Barbara Dayer Gallati is curator emerita, American Art, Brooklyn Museum. Erica Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Marc Simpson is an independent art historian and curator. H. Barbara Weinberg is the former curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Read more
Reviews
This is the first review I have ever written on this site. People are being way to kind about this book. The reproductions are TERRIBLE. I live in NYC, and the show is going on right now at the Metropolitan museum of art. All of the paintings from this book are in the show. The show is so amazing, that i went one day, and woke up the next morning and went back. I will probably go again in a couple of days. At the show they have all of these astonishing paintings hanging, the most Sargent paintings I have seen in one area. Being a crazed Sargent fan, I almost wept. They have this table at the show with 4 of these books there so you can flip through them and read the text associated with the images. I was disgusted! I didn't see a single painting in the book that was well reproduced, or even acceptable. The color management was terrible, they made no effort against glare, the value levels were way off, some of the pictures were remarkably undersaturated or over saturated. For example, Sargen'ts portrait of Edwin Booth looks like they took a picture of it, then put it in photoshop and dropped a yellow/red saturation filter over it. The painting "a gust of wind" which is one of the most beautiful paintings i have ever seen face to face is printed in this book maybe a couple shades darker on the value scale, and its printed REVERSE horizontal. How the hell does that even happen? It's disrespectful. Sargent would have been outraged. I don't think painters collect images for books like this. I almost laughed out loud sitting there in the show surrounded by all of the real paintings flipping through this book. I was taking better photo reproductions with my iPhone 5S. I wish i was kidding. I wish I was just saying that for dramatic effect. If you saw the show, then you know what I am talking about. Don't act like this is okay. I would have bought this book instantly without even looking at a review had i not seen the show first, because i am such a big Sargent fan. But having seen the show, nothing will get me to buy this book. Ill just flip through my iPhone instead. To show you what I'm talking about I included my photo of "Edwin Booth" that i took with my iPhone with no edits or color corrections, as well as an image of the laughably terrible book reproduction of the same painting.Cheers,
