This biography casts new light upon the influences and family history of the famed American portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). Coauthors Corsano and Williman focus intently on two major figures in the artist’s life: Rose-Marie Ormand, Sargent’s niece and favored model, and her husband, Robert André-Michel, an art historian and the son of a prominent French art critic. Wed in 1913, young Robert and Rose-Marie were 'raised in the cult of the beautiful,' moving in refined circles of artists, scholars, and connoisseurs. Corsano and Williman use the couple’s correspondence records to eloquently chart the tragedy that WWI brings to their lives, and to the entirety of the European Belle Epoque. Robert perishes in the trenches as an infantry sergeant in 1917, and Rose-Marie bravely works as an army nurse until she too is killed, by German bombs, in 1918. The authors’ final chapters reconsider Sargent’s postwar work (including the mural masterpiece, Triumph of Religion) as memorial to his beloved family and to the era of beauty and refinement cut short by the Great War.