I always love checking out the Sargent rooms when I visit the MFA in Boston as his portraits are full of a different kind of life than most others, and I was very interested in a biography about him as I didn’t know much. This had lots of information but was generally rather boring for me, and I think it may have had to do with how the author perhaps didn’t care to interpret any of the facts.

Apparently there’s speculation about Sargent’s queerness (I’m all for it) which of course can’t be confirmed because of the times, but it’s like the author kept throwing things out there but not doing anything with it; I’d rather read a novelization of Sargent’s queer love life (please someone write it) than what was written about here.

Maybe I just haven’t read a biography lately that was just the facts, but I just wasn’t as interested in this as I’d hoped to be. I just realized that the author is an historian rather than an art historian which is possibly why it’s so flat; he wasn’t able to interpret the person via the art perhaps. I guess most what I wanted was to really see the man in the photograph on the cover as it’s such an amazing moment (with the sitters of one of my fave portraits of his), but I couldn’t find any of that in these pages. ( )