John Singer Sargent and the art of allusion

"The work of portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) has come to epitomize the glamor and anxiety of his age. In this innovative new study, Bruce Redford reveals the web of visual quotations and references that informs Sargent's most ambitious paintings. Throughout his career, Sargent was recognized and rewarded as a "Young Master" whose bravura portraits inspired comparison with the likes of Velazquez, Van Dyck, and Reynolds. At the same time, his paintings responded to the stylistic experiments and cultural preoccupations of a world on the cusp of modernity. Sargent achieved this complex synthesis through a pictorial language composed of witty acts of allusion. John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion offers the first sustained inquiry into the painter's practice of quotation--a practice that created a complex visual code. Through comparative analysis of thematic groupings of portraits and analogous literary texts, Redford shows how Sargent devised and transmitted that code. The result is an enhanced awareness of Sargent's daring gamesmanship, his place in the history of portraiture, and the dynamics of allusion in both art and literature"--Book jacket.