Hedgewhores, wagtails, cockatrices, whipsters: John Singer Sargent and his coterie of nature's artful dodgers

This dissertation considers the work of John Singer Sargent in the context of contemporary botany, gynaecology, literature and art to show that he and friends of his were, in their respective disciplines, mobilising the ideas of cross-fertilisation and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers to "naturalise" sexual inversion---an argument most famously invoked by Proust in the orchid and bee scene of A la recherche du temps perdu. In the nineteenth century human and floral sexualities were widely seen as intertwined, and the gynaecological treatise of Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi (one of Sargent's portrait subjects and friends), attests that this was the case in the world of his medical specialty as well as the broader cultural imaginary. New conceptions of the artist as a pollinator and/or a plant, moreover, were easily conflated with this general understanding of interspecies sexuality to engender a new understanding of artistic procreativity: works in diverse media came to be seen as the vegetable offspring of cross-fertilising encounters. By imagining the act of painting as a hand-pollination accomplished with his brush, then, Sargent was simultaneously declaring the naturalness and fruitfulness of his creative productions, visually elaborating a period poetics of homosexuality, and formulating a new sense of artistic subjectivity for himself.; This project has broader implications for the study of modernism. Its examination of the ways in which a particular facet of artistic modernism (an understanding of the act and materials of painting) intersected with the underside of a widely celebrated cultural erotics of pollinator-flower conjunctions opens up an alternative cultural trajectory to be charted, one whereby other, non-heterosexual, non-formalist narratives of production and reproduction came to be authorised.