John Singer Sargent, Mrs. Cecil Wade (or Frances Frew Wade), 1886
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856 - 1925)
Mrs. Cecil Wade (or Frances Frew Wade), 1886
Oil on canvas, 66 x 54 1/4 inches (167.64 x 137.8 cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, F86-23
I came to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art at a very fortunate time when the museum had just completed a very successful 50th-anniversary fundraising campaign, and there was a sort of giddy optimism in the air. In addition to museum purchase funds, the museum had an incredibly generous donor, Crosby Kemper, the Chief Executive Officer of the United Missouri Bank (now UMB), which had been founded by his grandfather. His relationship with the museum had had its ups and downs. I had the good luck to be the museum’s principal liaison with him during a remarkable “up” period, when his purchases transformed the American art collection, raising it to a completely new level in just a few years. At our first meeting, Crosby and I agreed that the museum needed a major Sargent portrait. I hardly had time to blink before he acquired this amazing masterwork. It’s a key painting in Sargent’s life story—the first major portrait he exhibited at the Royal Academy, just after he had moved to England to recover from the scandal he had created in Paris with Madame X. Shortly after we acquired it, Scott Heffley in the conservation studio restored it to its full original splendor, so that the whites glow like opalescent pearls, and I went to New York to find a suitable frame, a big pretentious French affair from the 18th century, which highlights all its dramatic qualities. Today this may well be the single most popular paintings in the entire museum and it’s featured on the cover of the new scholarly catalog of the museum’s collection, edited by Margaret Conrads.
Bibliography
Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 1991, pp. 40-42.
Henry Adams, A Bountiful Decade: Selected Acquisitions l977-l987 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, [exhibition catalog].
Henry Adams, "Mrs. Cecil Wade--Sargent Masterpiece Given to Museum," Calendar of Events, November l986, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, l-2.