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Welcome listeners to a bonus episode of Art Curious featuring my interview with Paul Fisher

about his latest book, The Grand Affair, John Singer-Sargent

in his world. An iconic American artist, John Singer-Sargent was also a complicated and mysterious

man. While presenting himself as a reserved button-up businessman, he scandalized viewers on both

sides of the Atlantic with his frankness and sensuality of his work.

At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait painting career

to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself

and that were undiscovered until after Sargent's death.

In this groundbreaking new biography, scholar Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the

buttoned up artist and his unbuttoned work. We follow him from his wandering trans-European

childhood to the salons of Paris and the scandals and enthusiasms he elicited, and on to London, where he mixed with

Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and with other aristocrats and eccentrics. Along the way, Sargent

formed a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling

partner. In later years, he journeyed around the world with his friend and patron Isabella Stuart Gardner and devoted himself to a new model, the African-American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKellar, who would become the subject of some of sergeant's most daring and powerful work.

Masterfully researched and stunningly written, the Grand Affair brings back to life one of our

most beloved artists and solidifies Fisher as a master of the genre. Paul Fisher is a professor of

American Studies at Wellesley College and the author of House of Wits, an intimate portrait of the

...