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Boston's Apollo: Sargent's model and hidden black nobility in American art

Michael Henry Adams
·5-min read

Boston’s Apollo, Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent, an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, was meant to examine a contradiction of race and visibility. Its intended run, from 13 February to 17 May, was curtailed by the coronavirus outbreak. Fortunately, we are left with a handsome and well-illustrated catalog from Yale University Press.

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In eight chapters, leading authorities discuss aspects of a nearly decade-long collaboration between the two men. As each are thought to have been gay, the studies raise an unanswered question: were they involved intimately? The catalogue also examines McKeller’s invisibility in light of long-term and widespread demeaning depictions or outright erasures of black people in American art and media, in the service of white supremacy.

In 1916, at 60, renowned as a portrait painter, Sargent approached the close of his life. In Boston, he undertook the second of three civic mural commissions, hoping to gain immortal fame by decorating the entrance halls of the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard’s Widener Library.

McKeller was 26 and had worked as a bellhop at Sargent’s hotel. Possessed of a magnificent physique, he became the painter’s preferred model.

Sargent’s projects were not without irony. Under Abbot Lawrence Lowell, Harvard was undergoing an inquisition to uncover and expel gays. The college president also wanted a quota for Jews, while the university barred black students from campus housing. Harvard would even, for 70 years, credit the library not to its black architect but to his white employer.

Given all that, it is not surprising that in Sargent’s finished work, McKeller was never depicted as himself.

Among allegorical decorations, neither McKeller’s kind eyes nor his placid face look back. Only his supple musculature is faithfully rendered. McKeller is sometimes older, he is intermittently younger, he is sometimes female and he is even divine. But he is always white.

The sole exception is a remarkable portrait sketch, painted for the artist’s pleasure over an unfinished image of a bird. Phantom wings make the man a superman. It is quite unlike anything else Sargent ever did.

The Gardner is hardly unique in having few African Americans on its staff. For the Sargent-McKeller project Catherine Morris, a member of the museum’s education department, convened community consultants who saw to black scholars’ inclusion.

Helga Davis, visiting curator, conducted interviews with McKeller’s last living relation, Deirdre McKeller O’Bryant. She elicited a crucial bit of family lore. Tom McKeller was suspected to have been gay, and had a greater reason than simple terror to leave Wilmington, North Carolina, the site of a notorious massacre in 1898, and travel north to Boston.

Lead curator Nathaniel Silver’s catalogue introduction, meanwhile, indicates how empathy can sometimes make a world of difference. Silver explains the Gardner project as originating from his “discovery” of a folio of signed sketches, some showing McKeller, which Sargent presented to his friend, patron and confidante Belle Gardner in 1922. Discerning that some showed the same black man, Silver became curious as to the model’s identity.

However, Trevor Fairbrother, an independent art historian who wrote the penultimate catalogue chapter, already knew it was McKeller – and more besides. He knew the Gardner had published selections from the folio twice before. He was aware that Sargent’s ravishing oil sketch had a prominent position in the artist’s studio but nonetheless spent 70 years in storage.

In 1986, it was Fairbrother’s unstinting work that convinced the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to purchase Sargent’s Portrait of a Negro Nude. There it joined works by John Singleton Copley, William Sidney Mount and Winslow Homer, resonant of a conception of not just black humanity but of an African American nobility.

Such works have echoes elsewhere, and not only on gallery walls. Not too many years after Sargent worked at Harvard and the Gardner, for example, African Americans in New York City were determined to promote public art espousing racial uplift. Much of the work they commissioned was more publicly visible.

In 1937, at the Harlem Court House, murals celebrating American independence and emancipation were commenced by a Japanese American painter, Eitaro Ishigaki. Each portrayed black people pursuing freedom, led by Washington and Lincoln.

Both, however, were found wanting. The “community”, said local papers, felt Lincoln looked “too Negroid” and Washington “too stern”. A vain attempt was made to address the complaints but New York City aldermen ordered the murals destroyed.

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In 1938, two new scenes – Exploitation of Labor and The Hoarding of Wealth by David Karfunkel – were installed in place of the original murals. They are still there but they are now censored in their turn, obscured by a heavy curtain, Karfunkel’s representation of history including slavery and nudity having offended a black court worker.

I discovered Ishigaki’s ill-fated contribution to the courthouse by accident, during a decade-long quest for the identity of the artist who created a 50ft pantheon of notable “Negroes” not far away, at the Joe Louis Bar and Restaurant on 125th Street near Fifth Avenue.

That building was designed by a black architect, Vertner Woodson Tandy, and inside and out it was sleekly modernistic. I was eventually able to determine that the mural was painted by a Cuban-born Italian Mexican American, Robert Edward Borgatta, and completed in August 1946.

Commissioned by the heroic “Brown Bomber”, including his unmistakable likeness, how different the Joe Louis Bar and Restaurant mural was from Sargent’s hidden images of McKeller. And yet it too was barely seen. It lasted only a year. The restaurant failed, and became a grocery store.

Such is the fragility of black nobility in art.