Lucas Museum Sargent on Loan to Met
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| John Singer Sargent, Las Meninas, after Velázquez, 1879 |
A painting bought by the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is making its debut at the Metropolitan Museum. The latter's exhibition "Sargent and Paris" includes the artist's spirited copy of Velázquez's Las Meninas, purchased for the Lucas in 2019. It is one of at least nine copies of Velázquez paintings that Sargent made at the Prado in fall 1879.
The Met show connects the engagement with Las Meninas to subsequent Sargent portraits such as The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Rather than striking a conventional pose, the girls stand and sit randomly at the threshold of a dark room. A mirror (reflecting a window) is visible in the gloom.
This isn't the first time a Lucas painting has been shown at the Met. In 2022 the New York museum displayed Robert Colescott's George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware: Page from an American History Textbook in a special installation near its model, Emmanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware.
The Lucas Museum is to open in 2026.
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| John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Museum of Fine Arts Boston |
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| Installation view, "Sargent and Paris," with the Hammer Museum's Dr. Pozzi at Home |
Comments
One of the thunderstrike characteristics of the original is its monumentality: Its dimensions are 318 cm × 276 cm (125.2 in × 108.7 in). But Sargent's copy is 113.7 × 100.3 cm (44 3/4 × 39 1/2 in).
The Lucas museum is going to be straddling those two worlds. So will "treacle" necessarily be worse than or as bad as (or even less bad than) avant garde for avant-garde's sake is?
Say more. He was disfavored forever, although not lately.
Why do you think so?
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Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the 1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking aesthetic quality: "Wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist."[110] In the 1930s, Lewis Mumford led a chorus of the severest critics: "Sargent remained to the end an illustrator ... the most adroit appearance of workmanship, the most dashing eye for effect, cannot conceal the essential emptiness of Sargent's mind, or the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of a certain part of his execution."
Portrait painters never achieve that status.
The anti-woke art critic knows nothing about art.
> wonderful that this wonderful
> performance should ever have
> been confused with that of
> an artist."
Huh? Methinks he doth protest too much.
> The anti-woke art critic
> knows nothing about art.
LOL. If I look up the word "troll" will I see your picture?
The anti-woke art critic is a hypocrite.