Sargent's Women
Four Lives Behind the Canvas
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Narrated by:
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Elizabeth Wiley
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By:
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Donna M. Lucey
About this listen
With unprecedented access to newly discovered sources, Donna M. Lucey illuminates the lives of four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny clairvoyance, Sargent's portraits hint at the mysteries, passions, and tragedies that unfolded in his subjects' lives.
Sequestered in a fantasy-land castle in the remote Rocky Mountains, Elsie Palmer carried on a labyrinthine love life; Elizabeth Chanler stepped into a maze of infidelity with her best friend's husband; as the veiled image of Sally Fairchild - beautiful, commanding, and poison-tongued - emerged on Sargent's canvas, the power of his artistry lured her sister Lucia into an ill-fated life in art; shrewd, iron-willed Isabella Stewart Gardner collected both art and young men. Born to unimaginable wealth, these women lived on an operatic scale, and their letters and diaries create a rich depiction of the Gilded Age and the acclaimed but secretive painter whose canvases defined the era.
©2017 Donna M. Lucey (P)2017 HighBridge, A Division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the 20th century's most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait. Anne-Marie O'Connor, writer for the Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure.
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Get a better narrator.
- By David A Weatherbie on 04-13-15
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England's Mistress
- The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton
- By: Kate Williams
- Narrated by: Josephine Bailey
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Emma Hamilton was England's first superstar. She fought her way out of dire poverty to become a fashion icon, an Ambassador's wife, a confidante of both Marie Antoinette and the Queen of Naples, and the mistress of Lord Nelson, England's greatest military hero.
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Riveting.
- By jojonow on 06-12-08
By: Kate Williams
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Bunny Mellon
- The Life of an American Style Legend
- By: Meryl Gordon
- Narrated by: Vanessa Cortland
- Length: 17 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A new biography of Bunny Mellon, the style icon and American aristocrat who designed the White House Rose Garden for her friend JFK and served as a living witness to 20th century American history, operating in the high-level arenas of politics, diplomacy, art, and fashion.
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Well written bio.
- By Minda Leah Kahn on 09-01-18
By: Meryl Gordon
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American Ghost
- A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest
- By: Hannah Nordhaus
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.
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A true American tale
- By Cleo Colorado on 05-29-15
By: Hannah Nordhaus
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The Greater Journey
- Americans in Paris
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
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McCullough takes it to the next level
- By gregory m loyd on 07-12-11
By: David McCullough
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The Glitter and the Gold
- The American Duchess - In Her Own Words
- By: Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Consuelo Vanderbilt was young, beautiful and the heir to a vast family fortune. She was also deeply in love with an American suitor when her mother chose instead for her to fulfill her social ambitions and marry an English Duke. Leaving her life in America, she came to England as the Duchess of Marlborough in 1895 and took up residence in her new home: Blenheim Palace. The ninth Duchess gives unique first-hand insight into life at the very pinnacle of English society in the Edwardian era.
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Facinating Story- Terrible reading
- By Ashley D on 03-27-14
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The Curse of Beauty
- The Scandalous & Tragic Life of Audrey Munson, America's First Supermodel
- By: James Bone
- Narrated by: Marianne Fraulo
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist's model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon - her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. Her name is Audrey Munson.
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Fascinating
- By Аmazon Customer on 04-06-17
By: James Bone
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Empty Mansions
- The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
- By: Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr.
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades.
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Fascinating, But Know This...
- By Karen K on 04-08-15
By: Bill Dedman, and others
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Royal Sisters
- Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret
- By: Anne Edwards
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In Royal Sisters, Anne Edwards, author of the best-selling Vivien Leigh: A Biography and Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor, has written the first dual biography of Elizabeth, the princess who was to become Queen, and her younger sister, Margaret, who was to be her subject. From birth to maturity, they were the stuff of which dreams are made.
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Where's The Rest?
- By Simone on 12-19-17
By: Anne Edwards
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Zelda Fitzgerald
- The Tragic, Meticulously Researched Biography of the Jazz Age's High Priestess
- By: Sally Cline
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
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The Beautiful and the Bungled
- By Silverthorne on 12-08-17
By: Sally Cline
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The Husband Hunters
- American Heiresses Who Married into the British Aristocracy
- By: Anne de Courcy
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Towards the end of the 19th century and for the first few years of the 20th, a strange invasion took place in Britain. The citadel of power, privilege, and breeding in which the titled, land-owning governing class had barricaded itself for so long was breached. The incomers were a group of young women who, 50 years earlier, would have been looked on as the alien denizens of another world - the New World, to be precise. From 1874 - the year that Jennie Jerome, the first known "Dollar Princess", married Randolph Churchill - to 1905, dozens of young American heiresses married into the British peerage....
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Bondfide Valuable History Lesson
- By A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. on 09-21-18
By: Anne de Courcy
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Mademoiselle
- Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History
- By: Rhonda Garelick
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 16 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Little black dresses. Fake pearls. Jersey knit. Blazers. Ballet flats. Today - and for nearly the last hundred years - we all see some version of Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel every time we pass a woman on the street. But few among us realize that Chanel’s role in the events of the twentieth century was as pervasive as her influence on fashion, or how deeply she absorbed and then brilliantly reimagined the historical currents around her.
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An Unlikable Portrait
- By Sara on 09-25-16
By: Rhonda Garelick
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Proust's Duchess
- How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siecle Paris
- By: Caroline Weber
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 29 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style."
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Enthralling, entertaining and brilliant
- By Uli Baer on 01-14-19
By: Caroline Weber
What listeners say about Sargent's Women
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- J9
- 04-13-18
Difficult to get past the narration.
I wanted to like this so much more but I kept getting distracted by the narrator’s inflections, style and character voices. A bit too over the top.
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- BB
- 11-16-17
Fascinating Book / Wrong Narrator
This is a well-written story about the lives of women of the Gilded Age who all had their portraits painted by Sargent. The author has done an excellent job of wading through masses of primary documents to give us an intimate portrait of a unique period in history. Unfortunately, the quality of the narration undercuts the writing as the operative approach to the narration is melodramatic and is frustrating to listen to. There is a dismissiveness towards the women inherent in the narration that manifests itself in the officious way in which the narrator chooses to express the heartfelt experiences expressed by these women in their letters and diaries. In other words, the narration makes the writing sound like a soap opera and does not do justice to the poignancy of what is being expressed. Yes, these women lived in an age of excess, but their stories do not deserve to be minimized by the overall tone taken by the narrator. I listened to it all and now intend to buy it in hardcover to have the portraits present as the stories are being told and to reread it without the narrator’s voice in my head.
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6 people found this helpful
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- LC
- 10-05-18
Great portrait of the gilded age
This ends up being more about the gilded age than the art, but I found it fascinating. The downside was the narrator who almost seemed to be making fun of either the people or the book. After a while I grew accustomed to her, but maybe the next time around she could camp it up less. Also this audio book needs a pdf of the portraits...
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1 person found this helpful
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- MiMi
- 04-22-22
Interesting…
…but could get bogged down and tedious. And the narrator, whenever reading a quote, used a different cartoon-character voice. It was not a bad book, just not a riveting book.
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- D M BOYCE
- 07-09-22
Detail of the Age
Learning more these days about Sargent this note only adds to that body but provides even more about this age and this contemporaries. Well done
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- SKWAD
- 01-08-18
The Gilded Age Comes Alive Through Portraiture
Donna M. Lucey's book illustrates the lives of the women in some of Sargent's most popular portraits. I especially loved learning about Isabella Stewart Gardner and her unique relationship with Sargent. A must-read (or must-listen, rarher) for those interested in the Gilded Age and the powerful families who patronized Sargent and established his reputation while simultaneously using his output to burnish their legacies. My only complaint is that some (but not all) of the French and Italian words are pronounced incorrectly in the reading.
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1 person found this helpful
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- David C
- 05-31-19
Buy the hardcover
Well written interesting stories that often refer to paintings and photographs that we cannot see. Not a fan of the narration but didn't put me off. Buy the hardcover for a more involved experience.
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- Joseph Keiffer
- 10-14-23
Complaints about the narration
are true. The narrator is professional, but she seemed to think that she was playing the part of a Gilded Age matron. Not a disaster, but occasionally irritating. Therefore four biographies of four of Sargent’s subjects and some were more interesting than others. Most was said about Isabella Stewart Gardner, but that was my least favorite. The author got into some interesting diaries and if you love Sargent, it is interesting to learn more about the sitters. One of my least favorite Sargent portraits is of Elsie Palmer; from the book you get some context. And the same is true of all the biographies.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-12-24
a great mix of art, history and biography
I really enjoyed listening to this, I didn't actually expect much, and was really surprised. a little bit of Sergeant's paintings and 80% the different women and their lives, and how they might have overlapped later on with Sergeant's life. wonderful read. I hope I define more books like this.
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- Jennifer
- 11-26-17
Bust for a big Sargent fan!
I expected the lives of these women to be filled with intrigue, excitement, or challenges. I found myself skipping chapters because they became so boring.
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6 people found this helpful