Beyond Beauty

‘Entertaining, compelling, revelatory – this is the must-read biography of the year' GYLES BRANDRETH

The first major biography of Florence-born American artist John Singer Sargent written for fifty years, published to mark the hundredth anniversary of his death.

Sargent was thought of as the portrait painter of his generation, famously capturing the glamour and beauty of the Gilded Age although he also lived to see and paint the First World War in harrowing detail. He lived within a fascinating milieu of creatives – Oscar Wilde, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Francis Millet.

Though Sargent has often been treated lightly by previous biographies, he was a complex man who had turbulent, unstable early years and progressive, bohemian values in later life. He came to resent the commissions from the upper classes, who wanted more beauty or grandeur than they possessed painted into the canvas, and he turned down the presidency of the Royal Academy when it was offered to him. This insightful and wonderful biography from art historian Devon Cox uncovers new material to illuminate the ultimately elusive figure of Sargent, going into aspects of his life such as hidden sexuality which have never been touched on before.