The True Story of the Black American Apollo

[Pelican Press 0]

The True Story of the ****** ********* Apollo

The world premiere of the ****** ********* Apollo. Credit: Des Moines Metro Opera

“********* Apollo”, an opera that opened at the Des Moines Metro Opera, tells the story of a ****** man, Thomas Eugene McKeller, who had a chance encounter with famed portrait artist John Singer Sergent and eventually became his muse and maybe even his lover.

The opera follows the men as they struggle to navigate their relationship as artist and model, as well as their nascent romance.

Apollo is one of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion and Greek and Roman mythology. One of the most important and complex of the Greek gods, he is the son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin brother of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. He is considered to be the most beautiful **** and is represented as the ideal of the kouros.

“Themes of erasure, the white gaze and the intimate relationship between the two men are explored in this powerful new work,” according to the

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The opera’s lecturer-in-residence Joshua Borths said the origins of the opera lie with the 2017 discovery of a series of Sargent’s sketches. By matching the poses in the sketches to the poses of Sargent’s famous works, curator Nathaniel Silver concluded that McKeller must have been the model.

In his notes on the show, composer Damien Geter said, “For many of his most famous works, which are mostly (if not all) paintings of folks of ********* descent, Sargent used the body of a ****** man as his model.” This included the white-skinned gods and goddesses that Sargent depicted in murals for Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.

Sargent was inspired by a number of disparate sources for his murals, ranging from classical statuary – Greek marbles and bronzes from Herculaneum – to such old masters as Michelangelo, Giulio Romano and Guido Reni.

At the center of his enterprise was McKeller, whose dazzling body was used as a model for most figures in the paintings – both male and female.

In November 1925 the Boston Evening Transcript reported on the unveiling of John Singer Sargent’s murals at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Having worked on the project for almost a decade, Sargent had ***** a few months earlier, in April, in London.

The painter’s agent in Boston, the architect Thomas A. Fox, recalled that the day after Sargent *****, a young ******** ********* man, Thomas Eugene McKeller, had visited him. ‘I just came to pay my respects, sir’, he told Fox, ‘and he went quietly away’

Sargent is known to have used a number of professional models throughout his career, mostly Italian.

Who was the ****** ********* Apollo?

In February 2017 Nathaniel Silver, the curator of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, stumbled upon a portfolio of nine drawings and a collotype by Sargent, which the painter had given Gardner in the 1920s. The discovery of these works of art was momentous.

Most of them showed McKeller and were related to the Museum of Fine Arts’ murals. Silver embarked on researching McKeller’s life and the results are presented in the striking and poignant exhibition under review.

Although the name of McKeller had been known to Sargent scholars and has appeared in publications on the painter, and although McKeller ***** as recently as 1962, the circumstances of his life had been erased from history, Burlington magazine reports.

To this day no photographs of him have been identified. Silver has delved into the subject with passion and focus. Through a variety of documentary sources, he has shed light on McKeller’s life – as he finely puts it: ‘a life simply lived’, according to Burlington.

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1890, Thomas moved to Boston in his mid-teens. Wilmington was at the time a theatre of episodes of ******* ********* against people of ******** origins, and Thomas no doubt looked for a better life in the North.

We have snippets of him, working in different locations: as a bellman operating the elevator at the Hotel Vendome, as a soldier in the 811th Pioneer Infantry regiment, as a labourer in Boston’s Naval Appraiser’s Store, again as an elevator operator in the Federal Building and finally as an employee at a postal office from January 1924 until his ******.

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