A new exhibit running at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) has reunited a set of paintings by John Singer Sargent that were on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age features approximately 100 objects from the AIC’s collection, private collections, and public institutions. Among them are four of the nine portrait paintings that Sargent exhibited inside the Palace of Fine Arts of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition:

• Mother and Child (Portrait of Mrs. Edward L. Davis and Her Son, Livingston Davis), 1890; on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
• Study of an Egyptian Girl, c.1891; from the AIC collection.
• Portrait of a Boy (Homer Saint-Gaudens and His Mother), c. 1890; on loan from the Carnegie Museum of Art.
• Portrait (Alice Vanderbilt Shepard), 1888; on loan from the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

The museum writes that “the exhibit examines Sargent’s impressive breadth of artistic accomplishment and the many connections between the artist, his patrons, his creative circle, and the city. In so doing, the exhibition opens up rich narratives about Chicago’s cultural ambitions, the development of a national art, and the interplay of traditionalism and modernism at the turn of the 20th century.”

The Chicago Sun-Times notes that “although Sargent only made two fleeting visits to Chicago, his works were showcased in more than 20 exhibitions in the fast-growing metropolis from 1888 through 1925 and acquired by local collectors like businessmen Charles Deering and Martin Ryerson.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, two-hundred-page catalog published by the Art Institute of Chicago and distributed by Yale University Press.

John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age runs from July 1 to September 30, 2018, in Regenstein Hall of the Art Institute of Chicago and requires a ticket.

An advertisement for the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2018 exhibition, John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age, uses a section of Portrait of a Boy (Homer Saint-Gaudens and His Mother), with the subject inexplicably described as a “vintage bad boy.” Homer Saint-Gaudens (1880-1958) was the son of World’s Fair sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.