An Exhibition Illuminates the Charged Relationship Between John Singer Sargent and His Black Muse, Thomas McKeller

A fortuitous elevator encounter between two men at a posh Boston hotel in 1916 resulted in a relationship that was instrumental to the creation of some of the most celebrated artworks of early twentieth-century America. One man was the affluent, internationally acclaimed white portraitist John Singer Sargent, and the other a young working-class black elevator attendant, Thomas McKeller, whose handsome looks and muscular body caught the artist’s attention. Over the next decade, until Sargen