Please join Professor Emeritus Neill Slaughter as he reveals how Sargent became the most sought after portrait painter of his generation.

John Singer Sargent became internationally renowned during his lifetime, primarily as a portrait painter, thereby preserving for posterity a wide array of individuals including family and friends, fellow artists, actors ,writers, poets, musicians/composers, philanthropists, politicians, bankers, industrialists, the aristocracy of Great Britain and Europe and even US Presidents. In short, he painted everyone that was anyone.

Admission $10 - Purchase tickets at this link.

Free for Sargent House Museum members, but reservations are required by email to office@sargenthouse.org

You've heard of Blind-man's Bluff, but what about Game of Graces, Cup and Ball, Pass the Slipper? Join us for a fun afternoon of games played on the Sargent House lawn in colonial times. Family crafts, too. Bring a picnic lunch and enjoy the garden and views in the heart of Gloucester. No rain date.

Come and paint in the open air on the beautiful lawns of the Sargent House Museum with award-winning local artist Vanessa Michalak. You'll find inspiration in the 18th century house, the gardens in full bloom, and the views of Main Street and beyond. Bring your own paints and materials. Come and paint or just come and see. No registration required. Check website in case of rain.

Get a glimpse into the life of an 18th century feminist in an easy walk through Gloucester's most historic neighborhood. This one-hour tour takes you past the garden of Judith Sargent's Georgian mansion, the nearby Unitarian Universalist church with its super-tall steeple, the modest house where Judith first lived with her husband, the home of Revolutionary War patriot Joseph Foster and more--all places with stories to tell about the life and times of a remarkable woman.

Registration required.

Mollie Crawford-Volk, a Harvard art professor and well-known Sargent scholar, will discuss research from her upcoming book on John Singer Sargent and his murals at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Registration required. Click here to register.

Pat Harris, Notable New England Women author will speak on her new book, which explores the museums and places of interest of several prominent New England women, including Judith Sargent Murray. Registration required. Click here to register.

To purchase a copy of the Pat’s book click here

What do Covid-19 nurses say when they speak for themselves? How do they see themselves and their work? Artist and nurse Vanessa Michalak asked nurses to take selfies and write statements about their experience of the pandemic.

The results have been called “powerful” and “intensely moving” by visitors to the Sargent House Museum gallery, where large-scale paintings based on the selfies are on display. Next to each painting, a large placard presents the nurses’ stories in their own words.

One nurse, who contracted the disease, lost her sense of taste and smell, apparently for good. “I may never be able to smell fresh air,” she says, but counts herself lucky. “Other people lost so much more.” Another nurse describes her frantic efforts to prepare family zoom calls for patients whose faces were “swollen and misshapen” from having to lie on their stomachs for days. Another nurse says, “I don’t think anyone outside of healthcare will every understand what we went through.”

Much of the pandemic has come to us in statistics. This project presents one human experience at a time. It brings new meaning to the phrase “up close and personal” and new emotion to a crisis that threatens to outlast our capacity to care.

The Nurse Project celebrates the heroic work of healthcare providers, and offers an opportunity for them to speak. “Nursing,” says Michalak, “is a profession where individuals often feel unheard; their concerns, intelligence and instincts sidelined.” Being a nurse, like being an artist, she says, “is deeply rooted in identity. It is more than just a job."

Join us on Monday, September 27, at 6:00pm EST, for an evening with The Nurse Project creator, Vanessa Michalak. The presentation will be live-streamed from the Sargent House Museum, allowing audience members to ask questions.

The event is free, but donations are encouraged. Please register here to receive a link. 

Join us to hear author Katherine Sherbooke tell the remarkable story of Lucy Stone (1818-1893), a Victorian woman who outraged her contemporaries—and helped change the course of women’s history. In a period when it was legal for men to beat their wives, and scandalous for women to speak in public, Stone stood up and spoke out. Boldly defying one convention after another, she attended college, lectured to mixed audiences against slavery, refused to take her husband’s name, and even removed the word “obey” from her marriage vows.

Join us for a fascinating talk—and bring your questions for a live Q&A session with the author. This event will be a live-streamed talk from the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester, MA, the 18th-century home of Judith Sargent, one of America’s earliest proponents of women’s rights.

The event is free but registration is required; Donations are encouraged.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is the story of a woman going slowly mad from enforced isolation. Everyone who has been isolated from work, friends and everyday activities during the pandemic can identify--up to a point. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," there seems to be something moving behind the strange vines and flowers that twist through the patterned wallpaper.

This haunting tale was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of fiction, poetry and essays about the subordination of women in a patriarchal world. Her book on women and economics won international acclaim and was translated into seven languages. Although widely regarded as the leading intellectual of the late 19th century women's movement, Gilman sank into obscurity after her death in 1935.

As part of the Sargent House Museum's series "Recovering Lost Voices," University of New England Professor of English Jennifer S. Tuttle tells the story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and how a team of archivists at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard recovered the works and restored the reputation of this early proponent of women's rights for our era and for generations to come.

This FREE online lecture will be held May 20, 2021, at 6 pm. Q&A to follow live talk. Registration is required: zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Jutxun0iSQyqdU-8f-eJAw

Haven't read "The Yellow Wallpaper"? Explore the story online here, and join us one week before the webinar for a free story discussion, on Thursday, May 13, at 6 pm.

“John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) – perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” Thus wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 

 “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written in 1892, captures the author’s personal experience of the “rest cure,” a treatment for female depression that was popular among notable women of the era, including Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. The rest cure required isolation from friends and family, and denied patients access to books, writing materials, and creative outlets in favor of total rest, massage, and a high fat and calorie diet. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is Gilman’s response to this experience, and has become a seminal feminist work on gender relations and mental health. 

Read “The Yellow Wallpaper” online, and join us for a lively talk of this remarkable, and haunting, tale (which has been deemed a horror story by some literary critics). The author is the subject of our upcoming webinar, part of a Sargent House Museum series called Recovering Lost Voices. Sargent House Museum board member and teacher Caroline Teague directs the conversation.  

The event is free, but registration is required. Sign up here.

New England parents in the 19th century nervously allowed their daughters to leave the countryside for work in the textile mills of the new era. For young women it was a unique opportunity to participate in the growing cash economy, help support their families, and experience life outside the home.  

Did work in the textile factories represent a step forward in women’s independence? The mills and mill-towns were full of disease, dangerous machinery and duplicitous men!  

The conjunction of innocent young females and the rough life of the mills generated reams of sensational fiction in the 19th century—lurid tales warning young women to stay home if they wished to avoid ruin. 

In her illustrated talk, Elizabeth DeWolfe, professor of history at the University of New England, explores the promise and the perils of 19th century factory work for women through the essays, poetry and prose of the era. DeWolfe is the author of ‘The Murder of Mary Bean,’ an award-winning book and true story of a ‘factory girl’ who lost her life in the upheavals of an industrializing nation.

Admission is free but reservations are required. To sign up, go to https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wGubAsD5TrGHbQ458LCvmw

The Sargent House Museum celebrates the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution with a talk by Barbara F. Berenson, author of Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers.

The talk is free, but registration is required - please sign-up. 

Few Massachusetts residents today will be surprised that their state, which led the fight to abolish slavery, provided leaders for the simultaneous struggle to earn women the right to vote. But they may be shocked to learn that their state also led the resistance to this change in American life.

Prominent leaders of the suffrage movement Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have overshadowed the role played by Massachusetts women such as Lucy Stone. But Stone played a vital role, as Berenson explains. And in the racial controversy that bitterly divided the movement’s leadership, Stone proved to be on the right side of history.

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Barbara F. Berenson served as senior attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In addition to Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, Berenson is the author of Boston and the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution, and co-editor of Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts.

Lecture by Sheila Skemp, Clare Leslie Marquette Professor of History at the University of Mississippi and Judith Sargent Murray biographer.

This program is free for CAM/SHM members or with Museum admission. Reservations required. Reserve online at Eventbrite or call (978)283-0455 x10

Come to the Sargent House to see Gloucester’s 18th century mansion in all its holiday splendor--and purchase exciting hand-made gifts.

• Local artisans will be selling jewelry, children’s clothing, pottery, one-of-a-kind quilts and more--and donating 25% of their profits to the Sargent House.

• Also on sale will be ornaments made by young people at Pathways for Children. All proceeds to Pathways.

• Plus you can purchase the Sargent House’s own beautifully decorated wreaths, garlands, displays and holly.

• Free and open to the public. Music, tasty refreshments, and lots of fun at one of Gloucester’s most historic homes.

As part of its centennial celebration, Gloucester’s Sargent House Museum will present “Sargent and Fashion,” a lecture by Dr. Erica Hirshler, of the Museum of Fine Arts, about the works of painter John Singer Sargent.  The artist is a descendant of the Sargent family of Gloucester and the great-great nephew of Judith Sargent, for whom the Sargent House was built.

Hirshler has written and lectured widely on American painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She will take the audience behind the scenes of the “Exhibition Lab” held at the Museum of Fine Arts in anticipation of the upcoming Tate Britain show, “Sargent and Fashion,” which will move to Boston in 2022. The Exhibition Lab includes an intriguing display of sumptuous clothing worn by the privileged people depicted in Sargent’s famous portraits.

Regarded as the most significant portraitist of his time, Sargent was known for controlling the presentation of his sitters through an exacting attention to details. He often chose what his subjects would wear, going so far as to require one sitter to pose in a heavy woolen overcoat through hot summer days in the studio, according to Hirshler.  Erica Hirshler is Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings and Acting Chair of Art of the Americas at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. She has published extensively on John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Dennis Bunker, William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, and women artists and collectors. She holds a BA from Wellesley College and a PhD from Boston University.

Tickets are $10 CAM/SHM members; $20 nonmembers. Sign up online at Eventbrite or call (978) 283-0455 x10

 In connection with the Sargent House Museum’s Centennial Exhibition featuring Sargent’s Charcoal portrait of Charles Sprague Sargent, one of the founders of the Museum,  Richard Ormond will provide a talk about John Singer Sargent’s Charcoals on September 28, 3PM at the Cape Ann Museum. Ormond is the grandson of Violet Sargent Ormond, sister of John Singer Sargent. He has co-authored with Elaine Kilmurray, the 7-volume catalogue raisonne of Sargents’ works.  His most recent book about John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal will become available October 8, 2019.  

One of the foremost authorities on the artist and former deputy director of the National Portrait Gallery and director of the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory, in Greenwich England, Ormond is currently working with the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City to mount a show of Sargents’ Charcoals, set to open in October of 2019.

Admission for the talk is free for members of either Sargent House Museum or Cape Ann Museum.  Admission is $10 for non-members. Reservations and tickets can be obtained on EventBrite.

The Dogtown Writers Festival is an event that the Gloucester Writers Center has designed to provide multiple creative opportunities for writing in unique venues, ensuring that all voices are heard.

Our workshops, keynote speakers, and panel discussions will explore, through dialogue and writing, the themes of:Words in Place, Words Over Time, and Words in People—Voices of Cape Ann.

The workshop with Anna Solomon - One Place, Infinite Encounters will be held at the Sargent House Museum

For more information on all the workshops or to register go to gloucesterwriters.org/dogtown-writers-festival/

Join us to welcome John Singleton Copley’s 1770-72 original oil portrait of Judith Sargent Murray back to Cape Ann! The portrait will be on view through March 2020 in collaboration with the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Sargent House Museum. Free for CAM/SHM members or with Museum admission. Space is limited; reservations required. Sign up online at Eventbrite

Tours and presentations are free to the public on Intern Day; light refreshments will be served. Donations are gratefully accepted to support the future of summer intern programs.

Interns will be stationed in several downstairs rooms at the Museum. They will offer informal “performances of understanding”, sharing what they have learned.

The Sargent House Museum will celebrate inquiry projects from summer interns during an afternoon of self-guided tours and informal presentations at the museum. The Summer Intern program brings college students into the museum’s mission and daily operations, with a broader goal of connecting students to the life and legacy of Judith Sargent Murray. Within the 10-week program, interns experience aspects of Sargent House Museum operations, development, and event planning. They explore resources at other local cultural institutions, and engage in inquiry-driven research projects inspired by summer work.

The Sargent House Museum opens for the season on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Come visit us during our centennial year.

• Be transported in time to The Victorian Era as you view the period decorated first floor of the Sargent House Museum.

• Enjoy a scene from Little Woman 10:15 and 10:45 performed by Gloucester Stage Youth Acting Workshop.

• Purchase decorated wreaths, displays, and holly on sale all day. Hot mulled cider and treats.

• Free and open to the public. No formal tours.

• For a full list of events/participants for Middle Street Walk go to middlestreetwalk.org

Join The Sargent House Museum in celebrating Middle Street Harvest Festival 2018. Come in from the cold to enjoy the hospitality of The Sargent House with cider and donuts in the 1782 home of Judith Sargent Murray, pioneering advocate of Women's Rights. Explore the first floor of this historic Georgian mansion, preserved with help of Judith’s great-great nephew, the artist John Singer Sargent. Open to all; FREE admission and treats.