Chapter 1: The Painter and the Critic: John Sargent and André
Michel
Chapter 2: The Ormonds and the Sargents
Chapter 3: Rose-Marie Ormond
Chapter 4: Robert André-Michel
Chapter 5: Robert’s War, 1914
Chapter 6: Rose-Marie’s War, 1914–1918
Chapter 7: The Paris Gun
Chapter 8: Sargent’s War, 1914–1919
Chapter 9: The End of The Triumph of Religion
Chapter 10: Epilogues
Bibliography
Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman are historians who have collaborated on studies of the Latin archives of the Middle Ages. Now they have turned their attention to a more contemporary subject, whose secrets they have uncovered in archives and eyewitness journals and letters.
An indelible account of lives maximally charged with talent and
romance, and horribly undone by loss. Karen Corsano and Daniel
Williman have produced a brilliant book, a tale of intertwined
families that is at once panoramic and intimate. Full of apposite
images and quotations from primary sources, it sets out to tell the
story of John Singer Sargent’s most famous commission—the murals
for the Boston Public Library—but it ends up telling a story that
is so much bigger, and even more moving.
*Washington Post*
This biography casts new light upon the influences and family
history of the famed American portraitist John Singer Sargent
(1856–1925). Coauthors Corsano and Williman focus intently on two
major figures in the artist’s life: Rose-Marie Ormand, Sargent’s
niece and favored model, and her husband, Robert André-Michel, an
art historian and the son of a prominent French art critic. Wed in
1913, young Robert and Rose-Marie were 'raised in the cult of the
beautiful,' moving in refined circles of artists, scholars, and
connoisseurs. Corsano and Williman use the couple’s correspondence
records to eloquently chart the tragedy that WWI brings to their
lives, and to the entirety of the European Belle Epoque. Robert
perishes in the trenches as an infantry sergeant in 1917, and
Rose-Marie bravely works as an army nurse until she too is killed,
by German bombs, in 1918. The authors’ final chapters reconsider
Sargent’s postwar work (including the mural masterpiece, Triumph of
Religion) as memorial to his beloved family and to the era of
beauty and refinement cut short by the Great War.
*Booklist*
This powerful book describes the tragic result of the rush to
Armageddon in August 1914 in a way that is not easily forgotten.
The subtitle of this evocative book leaves no doubts about the
human cost of the war: Painting Love and Loss.
*Art Eyewitness*
Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman have written a gem of a book.
Their research here reveals important new biographical discoveries
that fill out the historical record on renowned artist John Singer
Sargent and his body of work. In addition, the authors provide an
intimately nuanced and textured account of select moments and
events in the city of Paris and elsewhere during the First World
War. This deeply archival and beautifully elaborated story of art
and war, of human love and loss, will be of value and substantial
interest to art historians and the general reader alike.
*Sally M. Promey, Yale University; author of Painting Religion in
Public*
The authors have brilliantly captured a vibrant, artistic, and
intellectual Europe on the brink of catastrophic change. They have
combined the meticulous research and narrative pace of biography
with the lyricism of a love story, which, were it not poignantly
real, might seem to be the stuff of fiction. The adventure of
Robert’s scholarship and the beauty of Rose-Marie (captured in her
uncle’s ravishing studies) are silent testaments to the glory of
their short lives, the tragedy of the Great War that killed them
both, and the pity of promise unfulfilled.
*Elaine Kilmurray, research director, John Singer Sargent Catalogue
Raisonné*
Corsano and Williman have created a tapestry of cultural and family
connections, illuminating one particularly vibrant corner of the
turn-of-the-century world of Sargent and his cosmopolitan friends—a
world that would not survive the onslaught of war. The authors have
focused on a fascinating cast of characters with a moving tale to
tell.
*Mary McAuliffe*
Dan Williman and Karen Corsano have told the story of Robert and
Rose-Marie Michel for the first time, against the richly textured
artistic and intellectual milieu in which they grew up and
flourished. . . . The research has been exemplary, the authors
delving into French, English, and American archives (public and
private) in search of their quarry. Particularly revealing for me
is the new material on the André Michel family and their network of
relations; the story of Robert’s career as a scholar; and the
detailing of his military service from his reconstituted notebooks.
Rose-Marie’s wartime work as a nurse is documented and brought to
life, including a rare illustration of her among a group of nurses,
leading a line of blinded soldiers. Fascinating discoveries like
that abound in a narrative that is at once poignant at the human
level and revealing on the wider issues of scholarship, art, and
war.
*Richard Ormond, coauthor of John Singer Sargent: Complete
Paintings (from the foreword)*
John Singer Sargent and His Muse . . . intricately pieces together
the stories of Sargent, his niece, and her husband,
scholar-turned-soldier Robert André-Michel. . . . Corsano and
Williman affectingly describe how Sargent’s losses infused, but did
not weigh down, his work at the library. It’s a wrenching story
about a young couple largely lost to history, whose lives and
deaths touched the visions of a great American artist.
*Boston Globe*
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