Volume 43, Number 15 · October 3, 1996
Mortal Longings
By Caroline Fraser
The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
by Honor Moore
Viking, 372 pp., $29.95
In 1986, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston mounted an exhibition called 'The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930.' It collected formal portraits, landscapes, and still lifes by the renowned painters of the Boston School: Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, William Paxton, Edmund Tarbell, and the prince of the portraitists, John Singer Sargent. Many were members of the Boston Art Club, painters who lived on Marlborough Street and had studios on Beacon or Boylston Streets. Their works are by, for, and about Boston society. There are enough silks and feathered hats in their pictures to open a shop, enough chinoiseries to fill a museum, enough flowers to hold a funeral. They are pleasing paintings, to be sure, inspired mostly by the Impressionists, but their emphasis on interior scenes—drawing rooms, breakfast rooms, bedrooms—and closed-in, snow-covered city streets tends to suggest something of the character of nineteenth-century Boston, its cozy gentility, moral superiority, intellectual stuffiness, and suffocating boredom. Although the exhibition included works by a number of women, it did not include those of one of the most celebrated women painters in Boston at that time, John Singer Sargent's fourth cousin, Margarett Sargent.
Review, 2925 words
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