: Widely renowned as one of the great artists of the late
Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, John Singer Sargent
gained elite status as a monumental portraitist of sumptuously
gowned society matrons and men of great social status and power.
During Sargent's career, presidents, poets, patrons of the arts,
dukes and duchesses and tycoons all sat for the acknowledged
master.
A new exhibition, currently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art,
focuses on a subject not usually associated with the artist - his
profound images of children. "Great Expectations: John Singer
Sargent Painting Children," on view through January 16, features
43 pictures that have rarely been seen before.
In a time when most of his contemporaries produced the highly
popular romantic and sentimental images of children, Sargent was
a master of conveying the interior life of the child. While a
number of the pictures on view are posed formally, many are
simply of children going about the business of childhood. His
sitters are not particularly gleeful, most gaze solemnly out at
the world around them. Some are all dimples and innocence; others
are just as worldly as the infamous Madame X.
