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The model behind the drawings

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From NYTimes

John Singer Sargent’s Drawings Bring His Model Out of the Shadows

“Study of a Seated Male Nude Above a Roundel for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” 1916–1921.

The best exhibitions tell strong human stories, ones that we might not otherwise know. Such is the case with “Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a small show that’s built around a sensational painting, and that has an unreadable relationship at its heart.

The Gardner is, of course, in lockdown these days, and there’s no telling when that will end. But its show is compelling enough to make an impact even at a distance, through online images, a stirring short video, and an excellent book, all of which I recommend.

The lead characters of the tale are named in the title, though in an order of importance that might baffle some historians. Surely, they would think, Sargent (1856-1925) should have been listed first. The European-born American was one of the art luminaries of his day, a power-portraitist to the elite on both sides of the Atlantic (Isabella Stewart Gardner was a repeat sitter) who commanded top prices for his attentions.

Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962) was a bellhop and elevator attendant at Boston’s deluxe Hotel Vendome, where Sargent often stayed, and one of the many beautiful men he hired as studio models. Among them, McKeller may have been the only African-American. And he was possibly one of the few models of whom Sargent would come to say, in a letter to a friend,“ I don’t know what I shall do without him.”

The two men met in 1916, most likely at the Vendome, when Sargent was visiting from his home in London. At 60, the cosmopolitan bachelor — born in Florence, art-trained in Paris — was in the process of making a career transition from portraiture to the more prestigious genre of architectural decoration. Boston had become the staging place for that change.

In 1890, the Boston Public Library invited Sargent to contribute allegorical murals to its interior. Next came an important commission from the Museum of Fine Arts (the M.F.A.) for mural cycles for the rotunda and grand staircase of its new building. Finally, Harvard University asked him to contribute monumental paintings to its Widener Memorial Library, commemorating student lives lost in World War I. Sargent’s response was yes, yes, and yes.

It was for the M.F.A. project that Sargent first hired McKeller, whom he likely spotted at the Vendome. Then 26, McKeller had been born in Wilmington, N.C., when the city had had a thriving majority African-American population. And he was there, still a child, in 1898 when an explosion of anti-black violence changed all that. There was every reason for him to leave town and he eventually did, making his way to Boston where, after hotel work and a stint in the Army, he took a long-term post-office position, married at 44, and permanently settled down. (There may have been an additional reason for his departure from home. In the exhibition video, McKeller’s great-niece, Deidre O’Bryant suggests that McKeller was suspected of being gay. “To be gay was taboo,” she says, “even within your own family.”)

Continues with additional drawings and a video

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/arts/design/john-singer-sargent-drawings-gardner-museum.html

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