In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a young African-American elevator attendant, at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller posed for most of the figures—both male and female—in Sargent’s murals in the Museum of Fine Arts. The painter transformed McKeller into white gods and goddesses, creating soaring allegories of the liberal arts that celebrated the recent expansion of the city’s premier civic museum.

The preliminary drawings Sargent gave to Isabella Stewart Gardner provide a window into these metamorphoses of race, gender, and identity. Sargent’s visually arresting and emotionally powerful studies of McKeller attest to a collaboration between two men, black and white, artist and model, at a time of intense social upheaval in Boston. The drawings—shown together for the first time—and related material help us form a picture of McKeller’s life and central importance in Sargent’s major artistic commissions, while raising critical questions of race, sexuality, and class—as relevant today as they were in Gilded Age Boston.

An inclusive interpretation strategy and several community roundtable discussions for this exhibition have yielded multiple perspectives from local artists, scholars, community thought leaders, and Thomas McKeller’s descendants, whose responses form a powerful presence through wall texts, audio, an in-gallery video, and a rich program of public talks and performances. We invite you to experience this multifaceted exhibition that brings together our own voices with those of the past.