John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to American parents and never really kept a home country; his training came in Italy and France, and London became his base. His parents travelled, and he grew up fluent in English, French, Italian and German, at ease in every capital he would later paint.

The reputation he built was as a portraitist, and he enjoyed international acclaim early: a picture he sent to the Paris Salon in the 1880s, the Madame Gautreau portrait, was meant to confirm his place as a society painter in Paris. He worked at the height of the grand manner, painting the wealthy in their houses, their silks and their self-regard.

Paris nearly finished him. The Madame Gautreau portrait of 1884, meant to crown his standing there, provoked a scandal instead, and within a year he had left for England, where the portrait practice went on and prospered. The same picture is now held among his finest, and he thought so himself.

The scandal has a twin lesson in the work itself. What set him apart was the sheer facility, a hand that could draw with a loaded brush, admired in his lifetime and faulted as shallowness; his commissioned likenesses kept to convention, while his private studies and landscapes moved close to Impressionism.

Late in life he wearied of the demands of formal portraiture and gave his strength to murals and to open-air work. The watercolors ran to more than two thousand sheets, gathered from his travels through Europe, the Middle East and the American West.

His likenesses at their best give back a person, not a pose; the admirers who rank him beside Velázquez for that have history on their side, since Velázquez was the master he studied hardest.