ABSTRACT
(1856–1925), American painter. Sargent’s homosexuality exists more in the reclamatory efforts of art historians than in documentation from his life. He enjoyed a brilliant career as a society portraitist, yet remained reticent about his private concerns – he was the proverbial ‘confirmed bachelor’. Sargent associated with notorious fin de siècle aesthetes and dandies such as Oscar wilde, Robert de montesquiou and Henry james; and it is known that he kept an album overstuffed with photographs of ‘primitive’ male nudes. His personal papers were destroyed by his family at his death and little is known about the artist’s 25-year relationship with Italian model-turned-valet Nicola d’Inverno. If Sargent was homosexual, his mastery of social proprieties served equally to obscure his amative interests and to fuel his often insightful, sometimes scandalous, artwork.
