JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND CHICAGO’S GILDED AGE

JULY 1–SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the most sought-after portraitist of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic, creating powerful, vibrant likenesses of his sitters. Born in Florence to American parents, he trained in Paris, settled in London, and traveled the world in search of subjects. Portraiture represents but one component of the artist’s considerable talents, however. He likewise excelled at landscapes, genre pictures, figure studies, murals, and plein air watercolors. John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age will present his extraordinary breadth and skill to audiences at the Art Institute, which last hosted a major exhibition of Sargent’s work some thirty years ago.

Cover: John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925). The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, 1907. Oil on canvas; 71.4 × 56.5

1 1 cm (28 /8 × 22 /4 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago. Left: John Singer Sargent. Mrs. George Swinton (Elizabeth Ebsworth), 1897. Oil

3 3 on canvas; 231 × 124 cm (90 /4 × 48 /4 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago. Right, John Singer Sargent. Portrait of Charles Deering,

1 1917. Oil on canvas; 72.4 × 53.3 cm (28 /2 × 21 in.). The Art Institute to Chicago, Anonymous Loan.

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS 2 John Singer Sargent. The Loggia, Vizcaya, 1917. Watercolor and opaque watercolor with wax resist

7 15 over graphite on white, thick, rough textured wove paper; 40.3 × 53.2 cm (15 /8 × 20 /16 in.). The Art Institute to Chicago, Anonymous Loan.

Sargent’s Chicago story has yet to be told. In terms of family and friends, patrons, and the art market, Boston and New York are the principal American cities associated with the artist. Tracing Sargent’s connections to Chicago enables us to tell a tale about early efforts to make a name for the city as a place for contemporary American art and about the midwestern touchpoints of Sargent’s cosmopolitan career.

Bringing together exhibition, collecting, and institutional histories, the project will illuminate Sargent’s cultural presence in Chicago during his lifetime, focusing on works that traveled here for public display or entered into private collections. In so doing, it will open up rich narratives about Chicago’s cultural ambitions, the stakes of a national art, and the interplay of traditionalism and modernism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sargent’s paintings were included in more than twenty Chicago exhibitions between 1888 and 1925, among them the Inter-State Industrial Exposition, the World’s Columbian Exposition, exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago, and the Art Institute’s annual exhibitions of American painting and sculpture. The painter first showed at the museum (then located at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street) in 1890, the year Chicago officially became the nation’s “second city” in terms of

3 John Singer Sargent. La Carmencita, 1890. Oil on canvas;

3 1 229 × 140 cm (90 /16 × 55 /8 in.). Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

John Singer Sargent. Portrait of a Boy, 1890. Oil on canvas; 152 ×

3 142 cm (59 /4 × 56 in.). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

John Singer Sargent. Olive Trees at Corfu, 1909. Oil on canvas;

1 1 71.4 × 92.1 cm (28 /8 × 36 /4 in.). Collection of Jamee J. and Marshall Field.

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS 4 population, as reported by the U.S. census. He made a bold debut with La Carmencita, a full-length portrait of a Spanish dancer that is part Old Master tribute and part Impressionist essay. Audiences in Chicago had an enviable viewing of this tour de force just weeks after it was painted and before audiences in London and Paris would see it.

John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age will also explore the connections between Sargent, his patrons, his creative circle, and the city. The artist’s Chicago story owes much to local businessman Charles Deering, who built an important collection of his works over a lifetime of friendship. Other area patrons and Art Institute supporters, including Martin Ryerson, Annie Swan Coburn, Robert Allerton, and the Friends of American Art, attest to the city’s enthusiasm for the artist and made possible the museum’s early acquisitions of his work. The first of these, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia,

John Singer Sargent. Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, 1892. Oil on

1 canvas; 205.7 × 115.6 cm (81 × 45 /2 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

5 Frascati, Italy, was purchased by Ryerson in 1912 and entered the collection two years later. Sargent’s peers—Giovanni Boldini, Dennis Miller Bunker, William Merritt Chase, Claude Monet, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, James McNeill Whistler, and Anders Zorn, among others—likewise exhibited in Chicago and appealed to area collectors.

SCOPE Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and comprising approximately one hundred objects, John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age begins with a key set of works from the museum’s collection and also includes both numerous objects on long-term loan to the Art Institute and major loans from private collectors and public institutions. The exhibition’s sections address Sargent and international portraiture; early genre paintings; kinship and exchanges with artists; Chicago collecting of Sargent and his circle; plein air painting among friends; figure and mural studies; and the Deering family and Vizcaya, James Deering’s grand estate in Miami.

CATALOGUE The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, two hundred-page catalogue published by the Art Institute of Chicago and distributed by Yale University Press. Curator Annelise K. Madsen will contribute an introduction as well as three essays examining Sargent’s participation in Chicago exhibitions, his place in local collections, and the Chicago connections among his circle. Conservator Mary Broadway will contribute a technical essay on Sargent’s watercolors, focusing on those in the Art Institute’s collection and on long-term loan. Her essay will also incorporate results of material analysis suggested by Senior Conservator Antoinette Owen. The distinguished Sargent scholar Richard Ormond will contribute a preface.

Annelise K. Madsen is Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Assistant Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently cocurated America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, which explored the art and culture of the Depression decade. (The exhibition was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and traveled to the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2016–17.) In 2013 she cocurated Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine. In addition to contributing essays to the exhibition catalogues for these projects, Madsen has published several essays on Gilded Age and Progressive Era art in journals including Winterthur Portfolio and American Art, as well as such volumes as Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (2011) and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (2013).

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS 6 Giovanni Boldini (Italian, 1842–1931). Portrait of James McNeill Whistler, 1897. Oil on canvas; 170.8 × 94.6 cm

1 1 (67 /4 × 37 /4 in.). Brooklyn Museum.

Dennis Miller Bunker (American, 1861–1890). Wild Asters, 1889. Oil on canvas; 63.5 × 76.2 cm (25 × 30 in.). Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville.

Anders Leonard Zorn (Swedish, 1860–1920). Mrs. Potter

5 Palmer, 1893. Oil on canvas; 258 × 141.2 cm (101 /8 ×

5 55 /8 in.). The Art Institute of Chicago.

7 Mary Broadway is Associate Conservator of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since joining the museum in 2014, she has studied and treated a range of works from Old Master prints to modern and contemporary drawings. The primary focus of her research and technical analysis has been on the Art Institute’s extensive collection of graphic works by Paul Gauguin. Broadway’s findings are published in the Art Institute’s online scholarly catalogue Gauguin Paintings, Sculpture, and Graphic Works at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paul Gauguin: Artist as Alchemist, which accompanies a forthcoming exhibition of the same title coorganized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Réunion des musées nationaux–Grand Palais.

Antoinette Owen is Senior Paper Conservator and Head of Paper Conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently contributed to the online scholarly catalogue Caillebotte Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, authoring technical entries on the artist’s works on paper. Owen is currently working on the online scholarly catalogue Manet Paintings and Works on Paper at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013 she coauthored (with Annette Manick) the essay “Bringing Back Something Fine” in John Singer Sargent Watercolors (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Richard Ormond is former Deputy Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and former Director of the National Maritime Museum. He is coauthor of the multivolume John Singer Sargent Catalogue Raisonné Project and the great-nephew of the artist.

THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO EXHIBITION PROSPECTUS 7