Margarett Williams McKean

Margarett Sargent (1892-1978)

was a Boston-born society woman, the fourth cousin of John Singer Sargent, and a lover or confidant of such diverse figures as Jane Bowles, George Luks, Betty Parsons, Berenice Abbott, Harpo Marx and Fanny Brice. She was, one gathers, a party girl who was plagued by alcoholism and mental breakdown in her later life. She was also a painter of genuine talent who, in a relatively brief period of productivity, from the early '20s to 1936, created a striking portrait of the privileged milieu in which she moved.

Her paintings contain strong echoes of Matisse, but they have an edgy quality which is far from the sunny ebullience that has made that master such a popular attraction. Color values often seem deliberately dissonant, and many paintings are dominated by a sallow shade of green-yellow that invades skin tones and gives Sargent's subjects the aura of creatures that thrive only in artificial light.

The portrait was Sargent's genre, with representations of society belles, dandies in evening dress, chorus girls and mannish women in tweeds and berets. Sargent's usual subjects exude a self-confidence and, at times, a self-dramatization, that marks their privileged social origins. At the same time, an underlying uneasiness pervades many of the paintings.

• Residence: 1910 - Boston Ward 11, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
• Residence: 1920 - Boston Ward 8, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Sep 24 2018, 19:24:50 UTC

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• Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Sep 24 2018, 19:23:43 UTC
• Residence: 1910 - Boston Ward 11, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
• Residence: 1920 - Boston Ward 8, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Sep 25 2018, 11:30:13 UTC

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Margarett Williams Sargent (August 31, 1892 - 1978) was a noted painter in the Ashcan School and a follower of George Luks. She exhibited as Margarett Sargent and Margarett W. McKean.

Margarett Williams Sargent was born on August 31, 1892, in Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, the daughter of Francis Williams Sargent (1848–1920) and Jane Welles Hunnewell (1851–1936). She was a distant relative of John Singer Sargent.

Sargent attended Miss Porter's School. After breaking a first engagement with Eddie Morgan, who was not accepted by her family, she trained as a sculptor in Italy, but later turned to watercolors and oils. She had her first show in New York in 1926, and later in Boston and Chicago. She was a student of Gutzon Borglum and George Luks. In 1919 Luks portraied her by memory in The White Blackbird. Frederic Clay Bartlett, who courted her, sketched her in Paris; in the 1930s the sketch hung in Bartlett's house at 1301 Astor Street, Chicago.

Her grand-daughter Honor Moore suggests she may have had an affair with her New York roommate, Marjorie Davenport. Fanny Brice lived downstairs to them. Sargent became friends with gallerist Betty Parsons, a friendship that would last for life. Another friend was socialite Vivian Pickman.

In 1920 Margarett Sargent married Quincy Adams Shawn Mckean (November 1, 1891 – August 1971), a polo player from an old Boston family. The courtship had begun in 1912, at Sargent's debut ball. In 1920 Shawn Mckean bought the Samuel Corning House in Beverly, Massachusetts. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. They had four children in three years: Q.A. Shaw Jr, Margarett "Margie", Jenny and Harry. In 1941 Margarett McKean (1922-2013) married Wally Reed. In 1944 Jenny McKean, married the Right Reverend Paul Moore Jr. and their daughter is author Honor Moore. In 1949 Margarett McKean remarried to Barclay H. Warburton III (divorced in 1959), the step-son of William Kissam Vanderbilt II. In 1952 Q.A. Shaw McKean, Jr., married Linda Huntington Borden, the daughter of John C. Borden. In 1966 Margarett McKean remarried to Stephen B. Vernon.

She was friends with Berenice Abbott, who took her portrait in Paris in 1928.

During her marriage, Sargent had both male and female lovers, and her husband as well had female lovers. One of Sargent's lovers was heiress Isabel Pell. Sargent said that Isabell was "handsome, wonderfully handsome". Pell used to visit Sargent at her Prides Crossing, Beverly, Massachusetts mansion, and was well known by both Sargent's husband, Quincy Adams Shaw McKean, and children, who called Pell "cousin Pell". Another male lover of Sargent was a young John Walker, who was to become the director of the National Gallery in Washington.

Sargent was an alcoholic and a frequent patient in sanitariums and received electroconvulsive therapy. After divorcing her, Mckean married Katherine Winthrop, whom he had met while still married to Sargent.

Margarett Williams Sargent died in 1978.

In 1996 Sargent's granddaughter, Honor Moore, published The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter.* Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Mar 10 2020, 0:53:41 UTC

• Reference: Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Mar 10 2020, 0:55:58 UTC