John Singer Sargent: The Boston Public Library Murals, Pt. 1

"Study for Frieze of the Prophets, Boston Public Library"
by John Singer Sargent

As John Singer Sargent prolifically painted portraits, figurative work and watercolors, he was also engaged with a stupendous decoration. Within a very few years of his arrival in England, when he was only thirty-four, he undertook his murals for the Boston Public Library and was occupied with it for the best part of thirty years. It was a task which taxed his imaginative and intellectual resources and evoked in him also a talent for the plastic arts and modelling in relief.

The Boston Public Library was designed by the famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White and was in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The trustees had resolved that it should be decorated internally in a manner worthy of the architecture. It was agreed to invite the cooperation of Sargent, Edwin Abbey, Puvis de Chavannes and Augustus St. Gaudens. Sargent was given the commission to decorate the special libraries floor at the head of the principal staircase: 84 feet long, 23 feet wide, and 26 feet high, lit from above with a vaulted ceiling.

Though Sargent's agreement with the trustees was come to in May, 1890, the contract was not signed till January 18, 1893, when they undertook to pay fifteen thousand dollars, and the painter to complete the work by December 30, 1897. In 1895 the scope of the scheme was very much extended. For another fifteen thousand dollars, Sargent agreed to decorate the side wall as well and another contract was signed.

His chosen subject for this work was "The development of religious thought from paganism through Judaism to Christianity.' For once he would not be dealing with the visible and tangible world, but rather a thing so abstract as a movement of thought. It was a daring scheme. He must have seen in a flash of intellectual vision the possibilities of the idea, and he started on the sketches immediately.

At the end of May, his friend Edwin Abbey wrote on the way to England: 

'I went into [John's] studio a day or two before I sailed and saw stacks of sketches of nude people, saints, I dare say, most of them, although from my cursory observations of them they seemed a bit earthy. You will surely get a great thing from him. He can do anything, and doesn't know himself what he can do. He is latent with all manner of possibilities and the Boston people need not be afraid that he will be eccentric or impressionistic, or anything that is not perfectly serious and non-experimental when it comes to work of this kind.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris.)