Florida’s Norton Museum acquires John Singer Sargent portrait of socialite who sponsored Amelia Earhart

John Singer Sargent, the American society portraitist, and Amelia Earhart, the daredevil American aviator, could belong collectively in some sort of nationwide pantheon, but it surely’s onerous to think about them ever crossing paths. Now, a lacking hyperlink between the 2 has resurfaced—Sargent’s stately 1905 portrait of socialite and philanthropist Amy Phipps Visitor, who sponsored Earhart’s essential first transatlantic flight in 1928.

This week the Norton Museum of Artwork in West Palm Seashore, Florida, introduced that it has acquired Portrait of Mrs. Frederick Visitor (Amy Phipps), an almost five-foot-tall work from the artist’s peak as a chronicler of the Anglo-American elite.

Amy Phipps Visitor (1872-1959) was the daughter of Henry Phipps, Jr, a enterprise companion of Pennsylvania metal magnate Andrew Carnegie, and the portrait was commissioned to commemorate her marriage ceremony to Frederick Edward Visitor—referred to as Freddie—who was a grandson of the seventh Duke of Marlborough. The portray is a present from Phipps Visitor’s grandson, Alexander M. D. C. Visitor, and the Visitor household.

Phipps Visitor sat for the portrait in Sargent’s now-legendary London studio, on Tite Road in Chelsea. It comprises the artist’s signature touches, says Paul Fisher, a professor of American research at Wellesley School and creator of The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent and His World, revealed final yr. Immediately recognizable as a Sargent, the portrait encompasses a luscious 18th-century-style panorama within the background, rendered in Sargent’s distinctive free brushwork.

Fisher says the scene’s ornamental balustrade was one among Sargent’s “superb props”—a part of a cache of “priceless antiques”, he provides, “that had been catalogued and bought when he died”. He compares the architectural fragment to the sitter’s pearls as an “accouterment of standing”.

Phipps Visitor and her husband had been early devotees of flying. Within the early Nineteen Twenties, Freddie Visitor, a liberal Member of Parliament, was Britain’s Secretary of State for Air (following within the footsteps of his cousin, Winston Churchill). By this time, the couple had separated, and Phipps Visitor, with grand Lengthy Island and Palm Seashore residences, had mounting ambitions to comply with in Charles Lindbergh’s proverbial footsteps and turn into the primary girl to fly throughout the Atlantic. She organised a airplane and a flight crew, however after her household satisfied her it was too harmful, she recommended a substitute. Earhart, an beginner pilot then working as a Boston social employee, took her place.

In 1928, a yr after Lindbergh’s solo crossing, Earhart—who, for this flight, was extra of a symbolic passenger than pilot—and the crew accomplished the journey from Newfoundland to Wales in underneath 21 hours. Beneath Phipps Visitor’s publicised sponsorship, the crossing made the photogenic Earhart, referred to as “Girl Lindy”, an A-list celeb. Her later 1937 disappearance over the Pacific, a part of an try and fly all over the world, was one of many largest information tales of its period.

The Sargent portrait of Earhart’s sponsor made a splash in 1906, when it was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy. However it hasn’t been proven in public because the Forties and hasn’t been hung in any respect in 20 years. The work’s earlier longtime proprietor was Phipps Visitor’s daughter-in-law, socialite and Duke of Windsor confidant C.Z. Visitor. She died in 2003 and the portrait has been “in storage ever since”, says her son, Alexander Visitor. The portray was formally handed over to the Norton in late 2022.

Visitor, a Miami-based gemmologist and jewelry specialist, says he selected the West Palm Seashore establishment over bigger museums like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Artwork and the Frick Assortment in order that his grandmother’s portrait could possibly be “a star” and never “find yourself within the basement”, which may occur to the perfect of work in bigger collections.

The Norton has positioned its new Sargent in an set up with classical themes, displaying it together with the artist’s Nineteen Twenties charcoal-on-paper examine for The Danaïdes, a grand mural commissioned by Boston’s Museum of Nice Arts, completed close to the top of his life.

In 1907, not lengthy earlier than he closed his Chelsea studio, Sargent painted Phipps Visitor’s mom and toddler son, Winston Visitor (Alexander’s father). That work, which echoes the sooner Phipps Visitor portrait, is on view at Previous Westbury Gardens, the Lengthy Island property constructed by Amy Phipps Visitor’s brother, John Shaffer Phipps, now open to the general public.

Each Phipps works had been made at a time when Sargent was rising weary of portray society girls, says Fisher. Through the Tite Road sittings, he says, the artist would generally go behind a display to stay out his tongue in frustration. And he would say to pals, alluding to plans to swear off the road of labor that had made him wealthy and well-known, “No extra mugs.”