John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes

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.

John Esten created and designed many books including Man Ray/Bazaar Years, Manhattan Style, and Hampton Style. A former art director at Harper's Bazaar and L'Officiel USA magazines, he has been a special consultant to the Grey Gallery of New York University, as well as guest curator at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York, and the International Center of Photography, New York.

Donna Hassler is an art historian specializing in American drawing and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was assistant curator at the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as the acting director and curator of the Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York. Ms. Hassler is currently executive director of the Rennsselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York. She is coauthor of the forthcoming book American Sculpture in the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Artists Born by 1885.