Join Professor Emeritus Neill Slaughter for an engaging lecture exploring the life, career, and enduring influence of celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent. Timed to the acclaimed Sargent & Paris exhibition at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this richly illustrated presentation traces Sargent’s rise from a gifted young portraitist in Paris to one of the defining artistic figures of the Gilded Age and early twentieth century.
Drawing from decades as both a practicing artist and art historian, Slaughter offers unique insight into Sargent’s painterly brilliance, artistic circle, and remarkable legacy, examining the artist not only through historical context, but also through the eye of a fellow painter. The lecture will explore Sargent’s early successes and controversies in Paris, his later triumphs in London and America, and the extraordinary technical mastery that continues to captivate audiences today.
Artist and educator Neill Slaughter graduated with a BFA from the University of Georgia in 1975 and received his MFA from Indiana University Bloomington in 1978. Until his retirement in 2016, Professor Slaughter taught fine arts and art history at the university level for nearly four decades, beginning at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia before teaching and lecturing internationally in England, California, and New York. In 1993, he joined Long Island University in Southampton, where he taught for nearly twenty-five years before being awarded Professor Emeritus status in 2017.
A practicing artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, Slaughter’s extensive travels have deeply informed his paintings and lectures. Among his honors are a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a Scottish Arts Council Grant, a Loyola Marymount University research grant to Africa, and a Fulbright Fellowship to India. In 2003 he received Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in both 2008 and 2022 he mounted major retrospective exhibitions celebrating over fifty years of artistic achievement.