A biography, based on original letters and diaries, illuminating four extraordinary women painted by the iconic Gilded Age high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent.
...Lucey vividly reveals the hidden truths of their tumultuous lives, while also succinctly telling the artist’s own intriguing story ... Lucey’s portrait of 'mercurial' and 'brazen' Isabella Stewart Gardner, the best known of the quartet, is as fresh and revelatory as Sargent’s scandalous painting as she recounts Gardner’s zeal for art collecting and her unique home museum. Lucey’s superlative group portrait, rendered in crystal-clear prose, is spring-fed by her immersion in vast archives of letters and diaries, her pilgrimages to the extraordinary places that shaped her subjects’ lives, and her keen insights into what drove these women to break out of their gilded cages.
...a rollicking snow globe version of an almost unimaginable world of wealth, crackpot notions of self-improvement and high-flying self-indulgence (like now; you know who you are, Goop) woven around an often passionate commitment to, deep admiration for and wide-ranging pursuit of the fine and literary arts (less like now). Lucey is a persistent detective and a bemused, sometimes amused, storyteller, attentive to interesting, hilarious, disturbing detail ... Lucey faces one significant difficulty as she slides these four clearly illuminated and carefully examined pearls onto a fascinating and filigreed chain, even as so many of the details are memorable and revealing. The problem with creating portraits of women from John Singer Sargent’s world is that so many of those portraits have already been brilliantly, unforgettably created and immortalized, from sketch to canvas, by Sargent himself.
