Locating Cosmopolitanism within a Trans-Atlantic Interpretive Frame: Critical Evaluation of Sargent’s Portraits and Figure Studies in Britain and the United States c.1886–1926

Abstract

This article examines how John Singer Sargent’s American nationality, his Anglo-American expatriate experience and his works’ cosmopolitanism coloured the views of British and American art writers. Notwithstanding his great success as a painter, these writers remained conflicted about the nature of his cosmopolitan sensibility throughout his life and afterwards.