"Every Stroke Telling": John Singer Sargent and Gilded Age Portraiture

Members: $12 Public: $20

One of the most celebrated painters of the Gilded Age, John Singer Sargent was best known for his oil portraits, whose bravura brushwork, grandeur, and vibrancy proved immensely appealing to sitters of affluence among the era’s social and cultural set. This lecture explores Sargent’s talents as a storyteller of the brush, focusing on how the artist’s many riveting likenesses both drew from the past and pushed painting in new directions at the turn of the twentieth century.

Annelise K. Madsen is the Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Assistant Curator of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is curator of the exhibition John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age (July 1–September 30, 2018) and author of its accompanying publication. Madsen cocurated America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s (2016) and Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine (2013). In addition to essays for exhibition catalogues, she has contributed several essays on Gilded Age and Progressive Era art to journals including Winterthur Portfolio (2014) and American Art (2012), 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). Her scholarship has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the United States Capitol Historical Society. She recently served on the board of the Association of Historians of American Art (2014–17). Madsen holds a PhD in art history from Stanford University and a BA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Image: John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 – 1925). Mrs. Jacob Wendell, 1888. Oil on canvas. New-York Historical Society, Gift of the Roger and Susan Hertog Charitable Fund and Jan and Warren Adelson, 2012.21