(c) 2018 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

John Singer Sargent Painting in the Gothic Room

photographer John Templeman Coolidge (Boston, 1856 - 1945)

Date1903

Place MadeBoston, Massachusetts, United States, North America

MediumPlatinum print

Dimensions16.2 x 13.7 cm (6 3/8 x 5 3/8 in.)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Accession numberARC.009262

eMuseum ID723004

Other NumberP27w19.1

EmbARK ObjectID18193

TMS Source ID6236

Last Updated8/9/24

Status

Not on view

Web CommentaryJohn Singer Sargent was the first artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. During the month of April 1903 he slept in a guest room (now called the Macknight Room) and created new works of art in his temporary studio, the Gothic Room. John Templeman Coolidge, an artist and friend of Isabella’s, took several photographs of Sargent painting the portrait of Gretchen Osgood Warren and her daughter Rachel in the Gothic Room. These candid pictures show Sargent in a whirl of activity with brush and palette in hand—and a cigarette in his mouth.

BibliographyNotesDavid McKibbin. Sargent's Boston, with an Essay and Biographical Summary and a Complete Check List of Sargent's Portraits (Boston, 1956), pp. 47-50.
Alan Chong. "Mrs. Gardner's museum of myth." Res 52 (Autumn 2007), pp. 212-220.
Christina Nielsen (ed.). Sargent on Location: Gardner's First Artist-in-Residence. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2018), p. 28, ill. p. 32, fig. 19, p. 57, no. 6.
Diana Seave Greenwald, "Who's Laughing in the Gothic Room?" Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 5 May 2020, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/whos-laughing-gothic-room

ProvenanceNotesProbably a gift from John Templeman Coolidge to Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1903.