![]() ![]() John Singer Sargent appears as a fictional character in relatively few but widely varied works of fiction: Children’s and Young Adult books, short stories, literary fiction, mystery stories, a play and even a ballet. ![]() I intend to ultimately communicate Sargent as a figure who successfully engaged with both the subversive and conventional in Victorian society. My work will begin with mid century explorations of the term through the works of Baudelaire, moving forward to its use by Vernon Lee, Pater and Wilde. The aim of this paper is to explore the public versus private identity of the portraitist John Singer Sargent through an aesthetic cultural exploration of the word “curious” and its synonyms. Therefore, Vernon Lee’s description of Sargent’s fascination with the “curious” and “exotic” becomes contradictory to Sargent’s prototypically masculine persona, as exemplified in social accounts and critical reviews that repeatedly define him as the “penetrative” surgeon of human personality. Current scholarship has explored the Aesthetic use of these terms as implying the want or presence of homosexual desire, which for Pater and many other aesthetes signified a duality or androgyny. In the wider scope of the late nineteenth century, the term has an undeniable Aesthetic connotation, being used widely by Pater, Wilde and Lee herself, most notably in Pater’s discussion of the Mona Lisa from his Leonardo essay of 1869. This word and its associates bizarre, strange, and exotic, appear habitually in the literature surrounding Sargent, including in critical reviews and personal letters. In her introduction to For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories, Vernon Lee, recounting her childhood wanderings in Bologna with John Singer Sargent, stated “Curious, that was the dominant adjective in John’s appreciations.” Curious is indeed, a curious term.
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