Sargent's Truncated Triumph: Art and Religion at the Boston Public Library, 1890-1925

Abstract

After investing significant parts of three decades in his Triumph of Religion, John Singer Sargent never painted the final image, the panel he called the keynote of the mural program. This article reconstructs the artist's declared intentions for his decoration, clarifies the project's narrative design, anchors the reception of the work in relation to contemporary politics of religion and race, and accounts for the unfinished state of the murals at the time of Sargent's death. Incompletion dramatically altered possible readings of Triumph, redirecting its narrative energies and generating new meanings that stood in marked contrast to the idea Sargent proposed.