John Singer Sargent: Love at First (and Second) Sight!

Painter John Singer Sargent’s love affair with Boston will be the focus of a slide and lecture presentation at the Salem Athenaeum on Friday, May 1, by renowned art historian and Sargent scholar Mary Crawford-Volk.  Her talk is titled “Sargent and Boston: Love at First (and Second!) Sight.” 

The presentation will begin with a wine-and-cheese reception at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20, or $15 for members of the Salem Athenæum. Crawford-Volk will speak at 7:30 p.m.

Sargent made his first professional visit to America in 1887 and spent the winter in Boston, launching a  lifelong affinity for the city and its cultural community that decisively marked his career. Mary Crawford-Volk explores how Boston patrons inspired some of the artist’s most exciting work, from portraits to landscapes to public murals.

A highly regarded lecturer, Crawford-Volk, who is fluent in Spanish, Italian and French, was awarded the Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Prize in Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education in 2002. She is widely known as an expert on Velasquez and other Spanish painters, and teaches the popular “From El Greco to Picasso” course at Harvard.  But American expatriate painters John Singer Sargent and James MacNeill Whistler have been the focus of her recent teaching and writing. 

Her published books include John Singer Sargent and El Jaleo, Rubenism, Vicencio Carducho and 17th Century Castilian Painting and she has contributed to exhibition catalogues produced by the National Gallery of Art in Washington and The Tate Gallery in London, and to art journals such as The Burlington Magazine. She is currently working on a large-scale public work, Sargent At Large, to be published by Yale University Press, as well as essays: “On Sargent and Assyria” and “Public Art in Boston: Challenges at Copley Square, 1890-1920.”

The Salem Athenæum is located at 337 Essex St. in Salem. For more information, call 978.744.2540 or visit www.salemathenæum.net.