A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.

Assembling evidence from diverse realms--visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts--this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.