Art Appreciation Lecture Series 2015 Meet the Masters: Highlights from the Scottish National Gallery
John Singer Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw Jane Clark 21 and 22 October 2015 14 November 2015
Why do people still routinely fall in love with Gertrude Agnew, 123 years after John Singer Sargent completed her portrait? I’ll suggest it’s the potent combination of personalities, paint, and, importantly I think, evolved biology. When she’s at home in the Scottish National Gallery, the guards apparently call her ‘the hussy’ because of the regularity with which visitors rush in to make sure she’s there. And now she’s here in Sydney, to seduce a whole new audience…
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John Singer Sargent, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Anthony van Dyck, Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of Southampton, c. 1640, NGV, Melbourne
Joshua Reynolds, Susanna Gale, c. 1763-4, NGV, Melbourne
John Singer Sargent, Monet painting by the edge of a wood, probably 1885, Tate, London
Édouard Manet, Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus, 1868, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Carolus-Duran, Mademoiselle de Lancey, 1876, Le Petit Palais, Paris
Velásquez, Rokeby Venus, c. 1647–51, National Gallery, London
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
François Sallé, The Anatomy Class at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, 1888, AGNSW, Sydney
John Singer Sargent, Carolus-Duran, 1879, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
John Singer Sargent, En route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish) also known as ‘Oyster gatherers of Cancale’, 1878, Corcoran Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
John Singer Sargent, A street in Venice, c. 1880–82, The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA
John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, 1882, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
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John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home, 1881, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
John Singer Sargent, Madame **** [Madame X], 1883-4, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Birth of Venus, 1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Bathers, 1884, Art Institute of Chicago
John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885-6, Tate, London
John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1918-9, Imperial War Museum, London
Select references:
James Lomax and Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent and the Edwardian age, Leeds Art Galleries, Leeds, 1979
Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent, Phaidon, Oxford, 1983
Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent, Abrams, New York, 1994
Julia Rayer Rolfe, The Portrait of a lady: Sargent and Lady Agnew, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1997
Elaine Kilmurray and Richard Ormond (eds), John Singer Sargent, Princeton University Press, : Princeton, 1998
Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: complete paintings, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998-2012, esp. vol. 5, Figures and landscapes 1883-1899
Deborah Davis, Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the fall of Madame X, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Penguin Group, New York, 2003
Alison Syme, A touch of blossom: John Singer Sargent and the queer flora of fin-de-siècle art, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2010
Steven Pinker, How the mind works, Norton, New York, 1997
Geoffrey Miller, The mating mind: how sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature, Doubleday, New York, 2000
Geoffrey Miller, Mating intelligence: sex, relationships, and the mind's reproductive system, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York, 2008
For access to all past lecture notes visit: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/members/current-members/member-events/meet-the-masters/