John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874–1882. Complete Paintings, Volume IV (First Edition)

ORMOND, Richard & Elaine KILMURRAY. John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874–1882. Complete Paintings, Volume IV. New Haven & London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006.

Quarto (319 x 260 mm). Original black cloth. Colour illustrated dust jacket. 446 pp., illustrated throughout with 250 colour and 45 black-and-white illustrations. Cataloguing 217 works. First edition.

John Singer Sargent is one of those artists whose popular reputation has at times worked against him — the dazzling facility, the society portraits, the sheer abundance of the work all lending themselves to a certain dismissiveness in serious critical circles. The catalogue raisonné that Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray have been building over many years is the sustained corrective to that view: a work of meticulous scholarship that reveals, volume by volume, the full depth and range of one of the most gifted painters of the nineteenth century. This fourth volume covers the crucial years 1874 to 1882 — the period of Sargent's formation and early maturity, when he was moving between Paris, Brittany, Capri, Spain, North Africa, and Venice, absorbing everything and developing, at extraordinary speed, a visual intelligence of the first order. The works catalogued here sit alongside the great portraits of these years but have their own claim on our attention: figures in landscape, architectural studies, seascapes, and studies after the masters, many published in full colour for the first time and documented with full provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. Ormond, himself Sargent's great-nephew, brings to the project both scholarly rigour and an uncommon intimacy with his subject.

Very good in like dust jacket. A few spots to inside covers of jacket and some very mild rubbing to extremities. Binding has bump along spine, however structurally the book is sound. Contents near fine. Some age toning at edges, and some mild foxing along top edge. Otherwise, clear and bright internally. Plates colourful and glossy, well preserved.

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Catalogue Number: HH000456