A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-De-Siècle Art

by Alison Syme

A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271036222
• ISBN13: 9780271036229
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 3.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 9.4" x 10.2"