Sargent's truncated 'Triumph': art and religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925 - painter John Singer Sargent

Finally, personal considerations, too, hindered the artist. By nature Sargent was not a controversialist. He had, in fact, demonstrated an indisposition to engaging in high-conflict situations. At a number of critical junctures in his career he opted to avoid open confrontation, even when avoidance meant redirecting himself in some pronounced fashion. His aversion to defending publicly his artistic choices - and to public speaking in the most pleasant surroundings - was well known. These characterological inclinations reinforced the tendency toward inertia produced in Sargent by increasing public opposition and decreasing artistic incentive. He managed somehow even to avoid any formal or official declaration regarding his "decision" to abandon Triumph of Religion. While no single factor accounted fully for the cessation of Sargent's labors at the Boston Public Library, the concurrence of social, artistic, and personal circumstances produced a situation in which religious controversy counted as the last straw - or maybe even the best excuse.

Many people contributed to the research and preparation of this article. Nancy J. Troy, Andrea Roth, Lory Frankel, Elaine Koss, Virginia Wageman, and two anonymous readers for Art Bulletin invested much-appreciated energy anti expertise in shaping the final version of the essay. Special thanks for insights, criticism, and encouragement along the way are due John Davis, Trevor Fairbrother, Roger Fallot, Meredith Gill, Anne Helmreich, Jennifer Krzyminski, David Morgan, Richard Murray, William Pressly, Ellen Smith, and Timothy Wardell. Janice Chadbourne, Katherine Dibble, John Dorsey, Catherine Hays, Elizabeth lyes Hunter, Liza Kirwin, Shelley Langdale, Melinda Linderer, Karen Smith Shafts, Miriam Stewart, R. Eugene Zepp, and Roberta Zonghi offered invaluable assistance with images, archival materials, and photographs.

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute, and the General Research Board of the University of Maryland at College Park in the completion of this manuscript.

1. On Sargent and the status of mural painting, see, for example, Thomas A. Fox, "John S. Sargent, 1856-1925, the Man - And Something of His Work," manuscript, n.d., Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums; John Singer Sargent Cabinet XXVI, Thomas A. Fox Papers, Bin 3.20 (this material is being transferred to the Boston Athenaeum); and Walter Tittle, "My Memories of John Singer Sargent," Illustrated London News, Apr. 25, 1925, quoted in Charles Merrill Mount, John Singer Sargent: A Biography (1955), New York, 1969, 366.

2. See, for example, "Head of Christ, by John Singer Sargent," Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, XXIII, no. 140, Dec. 1925, 70, which claims that Sargent intended the murals to be his "masterpiece"; Ralph Curtis to Isabella Stewart Gardner, July 2 [1910], Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Letter 73a, which describes the rentals as Sargent's "Boston piece de resistance"; and Hilaire Belloc, Many Cities, London, 1928, 84, where the Triumph is deemed the "highest, by far the highest, monument of his genius." For a discussion Sargent's rental cycle in terms of the ubiquitous late-nineteenth-century theme of the progress of Western civilization, see Sally M. Prommey, "'Triumphant Religion' in Public Places: John Singer Sargent and the Boston Public Library Murals," in New Dimensions in American Religious History, ed. Jay P. Dolan and James P. Wind, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1993, 3-27. The European genre of triumphal cycles (including, for example, James Barry's Progress of Human Culture, 1777-83, which Sargent hart undoubtedly seen at the Royal Society of Arts, London) and the intellectual history of progressive schemes of cultural evolotion form a significant backdrop to Sargent's enterprise.