Published on occasion of the major Sargent retrospective traveling to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999, John Singer Sargent: The
Male Nudes brings to light a fascinating portion of Sargent's work long hidden from the public eye.
Beginning in his adolescence, and throughout his distinguished career, John Singer Sargent, the celebrated painter of patricians, produced a superbly rendered, uninhibited book of work that
was rarely seen and never exhibited: the male nudes. Models were a significant aspect of the great painter's profession, whether they were commission-producing society "sitters" or
professional models used as reference for his three Boston mural projects or works created for his private enjoyment--one young Italian model stayed in the artist's employ for nearly
twenty-six years. Sargent's enduring subject was capturing the "human form divine" in portraits of the fashionable and famous and the absolute male.
Over the last century, these little-known works have been dispersed to museum archives and private collections throughout the United States and Great Britain. John Esten has unearthed the
most extraordinary of these images, ranging from vibrant watercolors and oil paintings to charcoal studies, published here for the first time in a single volume.
