John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Vernon Lee

Abstract

The year is 1881 and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) has captured his close friend, the art historian and aesthetic critic Vernon Lee (1856–1935) on canvas. Sargent’s bravura brushstroke conveys Lee’s keen intelligence and sharp wit, with inquisitive eyes peering through her gleaming spectacles. Reinforcing her agency to look, as a woman and as a woman art historian, Sargent’s portrait conveys Lee’s status as an authoritative cultural mediator who, as Hilary Fraser has observed, ‘decisively usurped the gaze’ through the medium of writing.