Sargent's Favorite Model

Between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent painted many oils and watercolors of his beloved niece  Rose-Marie Ormond, documenting the ideal summers he spent with her and other relatives during her teenage years. 

Rose-Marie married a promising young art historian, but their lives were to be cut short by tragedy, and the story is documented in a book by Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman.

"Wed in 1913, young Robert and Rose-Marie were 'raised in the cult of the beautiful,' moving in refined circles of artists, scholars, and connoisseurs. Corsano and Williman use the couple’s correspondence records to eloquently chart the tragedy that WWI brings to their lives, and to the entirety of the European Belle Epoque. Robert perishes in the trenches as an infantry sergeant in 1917, and Rose-Marie bravely works as an army nurse until she too is killed, by German bombs, in 1918." 

"The authors’ final chapters reconsider Sargent’s postwar work (including the mural masterpiece, Triumph of Religion) as memorial to his beloved family and to the era of beauty and refinement cut short by the Great War." ― Booklist

The book is called John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss

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Thanks, Paolo!