Richard Ormond: “Sargent’s Lady Agnew of Lochnaw”

Richard Ormond, the leading expert on John Singer Sargent, will trace the artist’s career from its beginnings to his major breakthrough in 1892 with his execution of the ravishing portrait of Gertrude Vernon, Lady Agnew, which opened the way to the British market and catapulted him to fame as a transatlantic superstar.

Richard Ormond, CBE [Commander of the British Empire] is a former Deputy Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and former Director of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England, where he was responsible for numerous exhibitions, among them, The Story of Time. A great-nephew of John Singer Sargent, Ormond is currently director of the Sargent catalogue raisonné project, as well as co-author of the eight Sargent volumes already published by Yale University Press (a ninth is forthcoming) and the curator of many Sargent exhibitions, including Sargent: Artists and Friends (on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in June 2015). He has written extensively on nineteenth-century British art, authoring books on Frederic Leighton, Edwin Landseer, Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and George Frederic Watts, among others.