Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
George Meredith, OM
John Singer Sargent American
Not on view
George Meredith (1828–1909) was a highly regarded poet and novelist in his own time, but is now little read. Sargent and Meredith had a number of friends in common, and socialized frequently in the early 1890s. In 1896, Meredith was persuaded to sit for Sargent. The stimulus seems to have been the creation of a frontispiece for the imminent publication of The Works of George Meredith (1896). Meredith was not pleased with his likeness, claiming "one eye looked completely dead" like "the eyes of a codfish kept for three days." Meredith’s biographer Lionel Stevenson, however, felt that Sargent captured "all the bristling vigor of his defiant old age."
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