Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) remains as elusive today as he was during his time. Art historians still grapple to classify his paintings and biographers try to unravel the mysteries of his personal life. Drawing on new research and unpublished memoirs and letters, Beyond Beauty illuminates Sargent's complex life as an American born and raised in Europe, as an art student in Paris almost better than his mentors, and as a working painter portraying the wealthy scions of Gilded Age society. Biographer and historian Devon Cox shows how Sargent captured the inner lives of his subjects in his stunning portraits while expressing his repressed desires through sensual landscapes. Cox sheds light on Sargent's intimate relationships with men, his sympathy with people on the edges of society, and his challenges to social strictures from setting Paris on fire with his scandalous portrait Madame X to immortalizing the Black bellman Thomas McKeller in his murals.