Thomas

John Singer Sargent’s “Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller,” painted between 1917 and 1921. (Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).


In 1916, artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962), a young African American elevator attendant at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which were among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Their relationship is explored in-depth in the book, Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent.

Edited by Nathaniel Silver, Boston’s Apollo is the companian book to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum exhibit of the same name, an exhibit that run from February 13 – October 12, 2020. The book features drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent. The book also “opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings.” In addition, its essays “offer the first biography of Thomas McKeller and a window into African American life in early 20th century Roxbury. They address [Sargent’s] sexuality, his models, and consider questions of race and gender.”

For more about this intriguing story I share the following excerpt from Lloyd Schwartz’s February 18, 2020 article, “Boston’s Apollo Names John Singer Sargent’s Black Model and Tells His Story”

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“Atlas, with the world on his shoulders, this was my body except my head.” That’s Thomas McKeller describing John Singer Sargent’s image of him in “Atlas and the Hesperides,” a painting that was part of the famous American artist’s large commission for the rotunda of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

For nearly a decade, McKeller was Sargent’s principal model for the heroic figures (both male and female) of that commission and another large-scale project, two huge allegorical murals commemorating Harvard’s contribution to World War I at the entrance to Harvard’s Widener Library. He was even the body (but not the head) Sargent used for his portrait of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell.

Now, after decades of anonymity, the model gets top billing in a new show at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum called “Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent.”

The relationship between this artist and his model is of special interest partly because the model is black—and except for the portrait of the Harvard president and one of the soldiers in the Harvard mural, he never has any clothes on. McKeller was 26 years old, and in magnificent shape, when the 60-year-old Sargent met him in an elevator at Boston’s fashionable Hotel Vendome. McKeller was operating the elevator, and Sargent asked him to model for him. Did McKeller agree only for the money?

In a short film posted by the Gardner Museum, the lone survivor of the McKeller family, McKeller’s great-niece Deirdre McKeller O’Bryant, suggests that her uncle came up to the more tolerant north because he was gay. Certainly one of the most intriguing elements of this show is the obvious possibility that there was a more intimate relationship between Sargent, whose homosexuality is now widely agreed upon, and McKeller than just a professional one.

One major piece of evidence for Sargent’s emotional or sexual feeling for McKeller is one oil painting (borrowed from the MFA), Sargent’s heroic portrait of McKeller as a full-frontally-nude angel (there seem to be wings from an earlier version Sargent tried to brush out), an unashamed, loving image of a complex, maybe even suffering figure, his legs splayed, his head turned partially away and looking upward to the source of light. Sargent never sold it. It was on his studio wall until his death.

The only surviving letter from Sargent to McKeller – displayed with other letters and memorabilia in the anteroom to the show – is one in which he asks McKeller to come to his studio. There’s also a mysteriously uncashed check for $20 from Sargent’s agent to McKeller (mysterious because McKeller often needed money – he called it a “gratuity” – to pay for necessities or to pay off debts). In 1934, nine years after Sargent’s death, McKeller got married.

The nine drawings of McKeller are an exciting find, some of them depicting wild action – McKeller on horseback – and some in more static poses. But the lines of Sargent’s charcoal, heavy or fine, are never static. They are constantly in motion, rushing the figure forward, flexing the figure’s muscles, caressing the figure’s every movement. The drawings are far more alive than the figures in the stilted mural itself.


To read Lloyd Schwartz’s article in its entirety, click here.


Related Off-site Links:
Revisiting The Black Model Behind John Singer Sargent’s Most Famous Works – Zoë Mitchell and Tiziana Dearing (Radio Boston, July 15, 2020).
John Singer Sargent’s Drawings Bring His Model Out of the Shadows – Holland Cotter (New York Times, May 7, 2020).
“Thomas McKeller Was Singular Among Sargent’s Pantheon of Models” – Sophie Lynford (Apollo, March 26, 2020).

See also the previous posts:
• “A Painting of a Desired, and Desiring, Subject”
• “Like a Classical Sculpture”
• Alireza Shojaian’s Richly Symbolic “Hamed Sinno et un de ses Frères”
• The Art of Stefano Junior
• The Art of Richard Vyse