Our Speaker Series is free & open to the public!

Light refreshments will be served.

A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. In The Grand Affair and in this talk, the historian Paul Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

Paul Fisher is an acclaimed biographer and cultural historian whose books bring to life American literary and artistic expatriates of the Belle Époque. His work has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications. His most recent book, The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, was named a New Yorker and a Times Literary Supplement book of the year in 2022 and was nominated for the Biographers International Organization’s Plutarch Prize in 2023. He has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Harvard, and is currently Professor and Chair of American Studies at Wellesley College.

This program is made possible by our generous sponsor, Christine Mayer and is presented in partnership with the Wellesley Free Library and the Friends of the Wellesley Free Libraries.