Daniel Williman

Karen Corsano

The core of this book is the life story of a manuscript codex, British Library Royal MS 13 E IV: the Latin Chronicle (from the Creation to 1300) of Guillaume de Nangis, copied in the abbey library of St-Denis-en-France. The authors shed new light on the production process, identifying the illuminator of the Royal MS and naming the scribe. Detailed evidence links the codex to important events in history, such as the Council of Constance, and famous actors like Jean de France, duc de Berry, Sigismund of Luxembourg, Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, and Henry VIII, to name a few. The authors show how it traveled from one capital to the other, narrating the entire life and interesting times of this codex. Another dimension of this study accounts for all twenty-two copies of the Chronicle, now scattered in nine cities from London to Vienna, placing each one in a scrupulously drawn stemma codicum and sketching its history.

A Manuscript’s Journey from Saint-Denis to St. Pancras

The World Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis

This sensitive and compelling biography sheds new light on John Singer Sargent’s art through an intimate history of his family. Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman focus especially on his niece and muse, Rose-Marie Ormond, telling her story for the first time. In a score of paintings created between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent documented the idyllic teenage summers of Rose-Marie and his own deepening affection for her serene beauty and good-hearted, candid charm. Rose-Marie married Robert, the only son of André Michel, the foremost art historian of his day, who had known Sargent and reviewed his paintings in the Paris Salons of the 1880s. Robert was a promising historian as well, until the Great War claimed him first as an infantry sergeant, then a victim, in 1914. His widow Rose-Marie served as a nurse in a rehabilitation hospital for blinded French soldiers until she too was killed, crushed under a bombed church vault, in 1918. Sargent expressed his grief, as he expressed all his emotions, on canvas: He painted ruined French churches and, in Gassed, blinded soldiers; he made his last murals for the Boston Public Library a cryptic memorial to Rose-Marie and her beloved Robert. Braiding together the lives and families of Rose-Marie, Robert, and John Sargent, the book spans their many worlds—Paris, the Alps, London, the Soissons front, and Boston. Drawing on a rich trove of letters, diaries, and journals, this beautifully illustrated history brings Sargent and his times to vivid life.

Karen Corsano

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