Amon Carter Museum of American Art acquires John Singer Sargent painting

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art announces today the acquisition of a major, full-length painting by John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). The work, titled Edwin Booth from 1890, is a portrait of the great 19th-century Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth (1833–1893). It was commissioned by members of The Players in New York City, a private club for actors founded by Booth and his friends in 1888, and remained there until 2002, when debt forced the club to sell it to a private collector. Now owned by the Amon Carter, Edwin Booth is on view in the museum’s main gallery.

The artist presents Booth in front of the grand fireplace in the club’s hallway, a place where Booth frequently stood giving toasts. (Booth, however, posed for the portrait in the artist’s studio a few blocks away.) Sargent painted the 5′ 7” actor life size, although he thinned the figure’s hips and legs to adjust for the painting’s original viewing height above the mantle in the club’s reading room. Booth appears simultaneously imposing and informal—larger than life, but equally gracious and meditative. Dressed in a dark, three-piece suit, not a stage costume, his attitude is relaxed, but his stance expresses latent energy and nervous tension.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
Born to expatriate American parents in Florence, Italy, John Singer Sargent remained abroad—primarily in London—most of his life. His reputation as an emerging artist of talent escalated meteorically with the 1884 exhibition of his mesmerizing and notoriously seductive portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau, popularly known as Madame X (Metropolitan Museum of Art). During his trip to America in 1887 to paint portraits on commission, he received his first solo exhibition in Boston at the St. Botolph Club; his reception there was both critically and popularly acclaimed. Throughout his life Sargent traveled extensively, shifting among exotic European locales where he would sketch and paint. By 1907, tired of the incessant commissions that attended his vast popularity as a portraitist, he vowed to abandon them in favor of other artistic interests, including landscape painting and watercolor. During his later years, Sargent concentrated on the murals he designed for the Boston Public Library. Following his death in London, three memorial exhibitions were immediately organized—at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and the Royal Academy in London.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is always free. More information at www.cartermuseum.org.