HBO's *The Gilded Age* introduces John Singer Sargent (played by Bobby Steggert) in its third season, depicting the artist painting a portrait of Gladys Russell. The show coincides with the 100th anniversary of Sargent's death and major exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. The episode features the unveiling of the portrait, which was actually a photograph printed on canvas with fake brushwork.
The Newport Art Museum will present "Howard Gardiner Cushing: A Harmony of Line and Color," the first major retrospective in decades of the Gilded Age artist, opening July 11. Guest curated by Ricardo Mercado in collaboration with Newport Curates, the exhibition features dozens of Cushing's full-length portraits and Asian-influenced decorative paintings, organized into two galleries that separate his two main genres: intimate depictions of family and friends, and semi-theatrical works. Cushing, who died in 1916 and was later dismissed as old-fashioned, is being restored to his place as an innovative artist who challenged academic conventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Carl Kahler's 1891 painting *My Wife's Lovers*, a monumental portrait of 42 cats commissioned by San Francisco millionaire Kate Birdsall Johnson, has resurfaced in popularity thanks to social media and a record-breaking sale at Sotheby's in 2016, where it fetched $826,000—more than double its high estimate. The article details Kahler's background as a horse-racing painter from Austria, his three-year stay at Johnson's Buena Vista Castle sketching her feline menagerie, and the painting's debut at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Johnson, an eccentric art collector and philanthropist, owned hundreds of cats and named the work after her late husband's nickname for them.
The Newport Art Museum will present 'Howard Gardiner Cushing: A Harmony of Line and Color' from July 12 to December 31, 2025, the first major retrospective in decades of the Gilded Age artist. Curated by Ricardo Mercado, the exhibition features over 55 paintings, many unseen publicly for over 60 years, and will be held in the museum's Cushing Gallery, named after the artist and funded by his patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.