John Singer Sargent / Gassed

Gassed
John Singer Sargent
oil, 7½ by 20 feet 1919

GASSED

by John Singer Sargent

"Gassed is a very large oil painting completed in March 1919 by John Singer Sargent. It depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War, with a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station. Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war and visited the Western Front in July 1918 spending time with the Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres. The painting was finished in March 1919 and voted picture of the year by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1919. It is now held by the Imperial War Museum."

The Secrets of John Singer Sargent’s Jewess, Lady Adele Meyer

The Secrets of John Singer Sargent’s Jewess, Lady Adele Meyer

How the American master came to this living portrait, true to life—but what life?

BY
JEREMY SIGLER
JUNE 14, 2017

John Singer Sargent’s prized 1896 portrait of Lady Adele Meyer and her children (Elsie Charlotte and Frank Cecil), which has been shown off and on at the Jewish Museum in New York, greets us with the image of a graying, 41-year-old, wealthy English patron of the opera, Lady Meyer, decked out in a pink satin and organdy dress. Her pale face is dappled with cosmetics and her dewy Drew Barrymore-ish eyes and lips are hypnotic and compelling. Her plunging neckline does not reveal cleavage, but the painting seems to play with our expectations by offering us a tall man’s view on the world.