Events & Programs

Professor Peter Gibian of McGill University will present John Singer Sargent's Traveling Culture: Portraits of Expatriate Experience.

Born in Italy to American parents who had become nomadic international wanderers, schooled in a number of cities throughout Europe, speaking multiple languages with native fluency, and traveling incessantly throughout his long professional career as a painter, Sargent seemed to many who met him to epitomize the stance of a whole generation of cosmopolitan expatriates--including Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent's close friend Henry James--who, during this "Age of Travel," chose to live lives based upon constant international movement, in semi-permanent exile from their home culture, thus breaking the ground for later waves of Modernist expatriates in the early 20th-century (Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and others). This talk presents a sort of insider's tour of this late-19th-century Age of Travel through a series of paintings Sargent produced in Paris, Brittany, Venice, Spain, Capri, and North Africa.

About Peter Gibian

Peter Gibian teaches American literature and culture in the English Department at McGill University Montréal, Québec, Canada. He has published two books--an edited essay collection, Mass Culture and Everyday Life, and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation. He has also published essays on Whitman, Melville, Poe, Twain, Wharton and James, John Singer Sargent, Edward Everett Hale, Doctor Holmes, Justice Holmes, Michael Snow and shopping mall spectacle, the experience of nineteenth-century shopping arcades, and cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century American literature.