Nude Study of Thomas E. McKeller

The man sitting on a table here, legs spread, shoulders pulled back, face turned up toward the light, is Thomas McKeller, a Black elevator operator from North Carolina who became Sargent's main model in Boston. Behind him a pair of great wings is blocked in with loose grey and blue strokes. They may be what is left of an abandoned idea, a Prometheus with the eagle that tormented him, planned for one of the round paintings in the museum's rotunda. Sargent let the myth go and kept painting the man. In the murals McKeller's body turned into gods and heroes with pale skin. Here his own face and colouring stay, and the curators who showed the picture in 2020 called it a figure study raised to the level of a portrait. Sargent never sold it, and it was still in his studio when he died. His estate lent it to the museum in 1929, then took it back in 1932, when it went to William James Junior, a Boston painter and a son of the philosopher William James. It later belonged to David McKibbin, the art librarian of the Boston Athenaeum and an early scholar of Sargent's work, and the museum bought it in 1986.