Books by Lydia Vagts

John Singer Sargent: Murals in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Mfa Spotlight)

by Carol Troyen, Pamela Hatchfield, Lydia Vagts

Born in Italy, trained in Paris and a resident of London, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) became Boston’s favorite painter in the 1880s. His commissions from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to decorate its new building’s grand staircase and rotunda resulted in one of Sargent’s last and most ambitious works. Sargent regarded the entire space as a giant canvas and brought together all the pictorial, decorative and architectural elements with a painter’s skill and vision. This compact volume offers a guide to the murals and their surroundings, elucidating their allegorical subjects drawn from classical mythology to emphasize the museum’s role as the guardian of fine arts.

Van Gogh The Roulin Family Portraits

by Nienke Bakker, Bregje Gerritse, Lydia Vagts, Katie Hanson, Christopher D. M. Atkins, Rachel Childers, Richard Newman, Muriel Geldof, Erin Mysak, Kathrin Pilz

With vibrant colors and imaginative backgrounds, Van Gogh's affectionate renderings of an entire family underscore his love of portraiture

Vincent van Gogh once wrote, "What I'm most passionate about...is the portrait, the modern portrait." This passion flourished between 1888 and '89 when, during his stay in Arles, in the South of France, the artist created a number of portraits of a neighboring family that had agreed to sit for him. The family included the local postman Joseph Roulin; his wife, Augustine; and their three children, Armand, Camille and Marcelle. Over the course of his year in Arles, the artist created an astonishing 26 painted portraits of the family members, both in groups and individually, as well as multiple drawings.
Van Gogh's tender relationship with the postman and his family and his groundbreaking portrayals of them are at the heart of this book, the first dedicated to the Roulin portraits. Drawing on letters from the artist, archival material, contemporary criticism and technical studies, The Roulin Family Portraits features insightful essays on Van Gogh's practice, his beliefs about portraiture, his personal relationship with the Roulins and his admiration for his contemporaries as well as 17th-century Dutch portraitists.
Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) began his painting career in his late twenties, influenced first by his work as a missionary in a mining region of Belgium, and later by his exposure to Impressionism while living in Paris. His bright signature style emerged after relocating to the South of France, where he produced more than 2,000 artworks in just over a decade.