The Private John Singer Sargent - Lucie-Smith, Edward

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Résumé :
A study of the celebrated american painter John Singer Sargent explores his public practice as a society portrait painter and thee personal and complex aspects of his own creative drive. Additional essays by the author include: Citizens and Kings, Collecting Contemporary Art, Halfway There With Delacroix and Daumier. Contemporary descriptions of his portraits, often from people who knew the sitters, are at least as often unfavourable as they are favourable, even when he was at the very height of his success. Perhaps this is the fate of all successful portrait painters. The artist often sees his subjects rather differently from the way they would like to be seen. Friends and acquaintances mal also have a different image stored away. So, too, professional commentators, if the subject of the portrait is well known. Two quotes from the artist himself sum up the situation perfectly: A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. - Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. ...

Biographie:
Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica. He moved to Britain in 1946, and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F., then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author. He is now an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has published more than a hundred books in all, including a biography of Joan of Arc (recently republished by Penguin in paperback as a 'classic biography'), a historical novel, and more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date. He has been curator of a number of exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988-90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art. He has been a jury member for the John Moores prize exhibition in Liverpool, and for biennials in Cairo, Sharjah, Alexandria and Belgrade. He was curator of 'New British Art'. at the Orion Gallery in Ostend (April-June 2001), of 'New Classicism: Artists of the Ideal', at Palazzo Forti, Verona (AprilSeptember 2002), and of 'Gods Becoming Men' at the Frissiras Museum, Athens [July-September 2004)....

Sommaire:
A study of the celebrated american painter John Singer Sargent explores his public practice as a society portrait painter and thee personal and complex aspects of his own creative drive. Additional essays by the author include: Citizens and Kings, Collecting Contemporary Art, Halfway There With Delacroix and Daumier. Contemporary descriptions of his portraits, often from people who knew the sitters, are at least as often unfavourable as they are favourable, even when he was at the very height of his success. Perhaps this is the fate of all successful portrait painters. The artist often sees his subjects rather differently from the way they would like to be seen. Friends and acquaintances mal also have a different image stored away. So, too, professional commentators, if the subject of the portrait is well known. Two quotes from the artist himself sum up the situation perfectly: A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. - Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend. ...