Fashioning manhood: John Singer Sargent and the construction of masculinity at the turn of the century

This dissertation examines a range of masculinities John Singer Sargent represented throughout his career. I consider Sargent's depictions of the dandy, the veteran, the neurasthenic and the soldier. Each was a type of manhood that was actuated in response to the social changes of the time. This study illustrates not only Sargent's awareness of different strategies for dealing with conflicts affecting masculinity, but also the artist's own complexity as a gendered being.;Chapter One analyzes Sargent's portraits of the dandy, a man whose primary concern was with the fashioning of his self into an artistic object, considering works such as Carolus-Duran, Dr. Pozzi at Home, W. Graham Robertson , and Lord Ribblesdale. This type's central presence in Sargent's oeuvre suggests that the artist was sensitive to the fluidity of contemporary masculine identity embodied in the dandy's disposition. Chapter Two shows that Sargent's portrait of the Civil War veteran and Boston Brahmin Henry Lee Higginson was intended to function as a model of admiral manhood for the young students of Harvard. By highlighting the sabre scar incised across Higginson's right cheek, Sargent underscored a sign of patriotic bravery and sacrifice as well as evoked the sitter's Anglo heritage. Chapter Three explores the product of Sargent's own masculine experience through a group of intimate works he painted during an extended vacation in the Canadian Rockies. These campsite subjects allow for a glimpse of Sargent's own subjectivity, for they are consistent with S. Weir Mitchell's West Cure prescription that directed a neurasthenic patient to sketch his immediate surroundings as a form of therapy while out West. Chapter Four examines Gassed, a monumental work that records the artist's recognition that the call for war as an antidote to a troubled masculinity was no longer tenable. Sargent did not depict a battlefield but presented instead a medical clearing station dominated by the bodies of wounded men suffering from exposure to mustard gas. Sargent's conceptions of men not only reveal his perception of the complexities of modern masculinity, affected by the interaction of social issues including feminism, race, class and sexuality, but they also embody aspects of the artist's own masculine identity.