McKeller, Thomas

Thomas E. McKeller (1890–1962, age 72). An elevator operator, World War I veteran, and artist’s model.

As an African American, McKeller bore witness to some of the most brutal events in America’s history. As a child, he experienced a massacre of the Black citizens of his hometown Wilmington, N.C., and the subsequent introduction of Jim Crow segregation laws, and never lived to see their abolition.

As a teenager, he joined the Great Migration, arriving in Boston and finding employment at the Hotel Vendome, where a chance encounter brought him face-to-face with painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

McKeller subsequently became Sargent’s principal model in this country. Two murals—at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University—as well as drawings and a full-length nude painting memorialize nearly a decade of work in the artist’s studio, where Sargent transformed McKeller into Apollo—god of the arts—as well as into goddesses, allegories, soldiers, and more.

The painter gifted a portfolio of these drawings to his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924).

A detail from John Singer Sargent’s “Thomas McKeller” (1917-21), the only portrait he did of the model as himself. Credit…Museum of Fine Arts, Boston