In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962) a young African American elevator attendant at Boston's Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent's murals in the new wing of the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter's most ambitious works. Sargent's nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent's iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of Thomas McKeller and a window into African America life in early 20th century Roxbury. They address the artist's sexuality, his models, and consider questions of race and gender.

"This book takes you through the collection gallery by gallery, illuminating the art and installations in each room"--From preface.

One of the most successful public relations campaigns in history, featuring heroic astronauts, press-savvy rocket scientists, enthusiastic reporters, deep-pocketed defense contractors, and Tang. In July 1969, ninety-four percent of American televisions were tuned to coverage of Apollo 11's mission to the moon. How did space exploration, once the purview of rocket scientists, reach a larger audience than My Three Sons? Why did a government program whose standard operating procedure had been secrecy turn its greatest achievement into a communal experience? In Marketing the Moon, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek tell the story of one of the most successful marketing and public relations campaigns in history: the selling of the Apollo program. Primed by science fiction, magazine articles, and appearances by Wernher von Braun on the “Tomorrowland” segments of the Disneyland prime time television show, Americans were a receptive audience for NASA's pioneering “brand journalism.” Scott and Jurek describe sophisticated efforts by NASA and its many contractors to market the facts about space travel—through press releases, bylined articles, lavishly detailed background materials, and fully produced radio and television features—rather than push an agenda. American astronauts, who signed exclusive agreements with Life magazine, became the heroic and patriotic faces of the program. And there was some judicious product placement: Hasselblad was the “first camera on the moon”; Sony cassette recorders and supplies of Tang were on board the capsule; and astronauts were equipped with the Exer-Genie personal exerciser. Everyone wanted a place on the bandwagon. Generously illustrated with vintage photographs, artwork, and advertisements, many never published before, Marketing the Moon shows that when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, it was a triumph not just for American engineering and rocketry but for American marketing and public relations.

In 1966 the author, newly graduated from college, went to work for the MIT laboratory where the Apollo guidance system was designed. His assignment was to program the complex lunar landing phase in the Lunar Module's onboard computer. As Apollo 11 approaches, the author flies lunar landings in simulators and meets the astronauts who will fly the LM for real. He explains the computer alarms that almost prevented Neil Armstrong from landing and describes a narrow escape from another dangerous problem. On Apollo 14 he devises a workaround when a faulty pushbutton threatens Alan Shepard's mission, earning a NASA award, a story in Rolling Stone, and a few lines in the history books. This memoir is a new kind of book about Apollo. It tells a story never told before by an insider -- the development of the onboard software for the Apollo spacecraft. It makes a vertical connection between technical details and historic events, but by broadening the story using his own experiences as he grows into adulthood in the 1960s the author draws a parallel between that era of successful space exploration, and the exploration, inner and outer, that was taking place in the culture.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch Award A bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes—and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself. In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent’s nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters—feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer’s life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent’s most daring and powerful work. Illuminating Sargent’s restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

A revealing and beautifully illustrated critical edition of Gardner’s collaged travel albums In 1865, art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) lost her only child to pneumonia at less than two years old. In an effort to rouse her from depression, Gardner and her husband, Jack, travelled to northern Europe and Russia. It was the first of many trips abroad that would eventually take her from the Middle East to Asia—trips that she documented in exquisitely crafted collaged travel albums. Fellow Wanderer brings together nearly thirty of Gardner’s striking travelogues, spanning some thirty-nine countries and offering invaluable perspective on the global influences on this legendary collector and patron of the arts. This book features beautiful facsimiles of Gardner’s travel albums—largely unpublished until now—along with essays by leading scholars who place these diaries and sketchbooks within the context of the art and culture of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in the nineteenth century. The essays explore a host of topics, such as Gardner’s engagement with world religions while abroad, how she incorporated designs and ideas from around the globe into her Boston museum, and the ways in which the imperial power structures of the era facilitated her travels. Lushly illustrated, Fellow Wanderer provides a uniquely intimate look at how Gardner’s rich and diverse experiences abroad instilled her collecting and patronage with a truly global vision of art. Distributed for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Exhibition Schedule Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston February 16–May 21, 2023

"Primarily it is a catalogue of the pieces in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society...."--Pref.