A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Sicle Art

ISBN: 0271036222

Author: Syme, Alison

Condition: New

A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to naturalize sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.Assembling evidence from diverse realms-visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts-this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargents paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargents friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.