A bold new biography of the legendary painter, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic fin de siècle culture he inhabited.

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. He scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work, while dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona. He charmed the possessors of new money and old, while reserving his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. Hardcover, 496 pages.