John Singer Sargent was an American portrait painter, born in Florence on January 12, 1856, and died in London on April 15, 1925. He painted the wealthy society of the Gilded Age in Paris, London and the United States.
His name rests on Madame X, the portrait that scandalized Paris in 1884, on his luminous watercolors, and on Gassed, his huge painting of soldiers blinded by gas in the First World War.
Sargent was an American who grew up in Europe. He made his name in Paris, lost his place there because of a single portrait, and lived the rest of his life in London.
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That European childhood was his parents' choice. Fitzwilliam Sargent, a doctor, and Mary Newbold Singer, the daughter of a successful merchant, both came from Philadelphia. After the death of their first child, Mary suffered a breakdown, and in the late summer of 1854 they left for Europe to recover.
They never settled back home. The family kept moving, with Paris as a base and seasons by the sea or in the mountains of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, and their son was born during a stay in Florence.
His first documented training came late, at the Accademia, the art school of Florence, in the winter of 1873 and 1874. In May 1874 his father sent him to Paris, to the studio of a fashionable portrait painter who signed his work Carolus-Duran.
The master told his students to paint directly, in broad planes of color, and to keep the freshness of a sketch. Sargent stayed with him as student and assistant until 1878. From 1877 he also showed his work at the Salon, the official exhibition held every spring in Paris, where young painters made their names.
In the autumn of 1879 he stopped attending classes regularly and set off for Spain, Holland and Venice. Spain gave him El Jaleo, a canvas almost 12 feet wide in which a dancer in a white skirt performs before a row of musicians, under footlights that throw long shadows up the wall behind them.
The title means both an uproar and a Spanish dance. Exhibited at the Salon of 1882, the picture was his greatest success there, and a Boston businessman, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, bought it at the exhibition.
Two years later he sent the Salon a portrait of a banker's wife. That one went so badly that he kept the canvas out of public view for more than twenty years.
Madame X and the Salon of 1884
The sitter was Virginie Gautreau, a celebrated beauty born in America and married to a French banker. Before the exhibition closed, she and her mother were begging Sargent to take down the portrait known today as Madame X.
What You'll Discover
Why the sitter begged him to withdraw it.
What he asked the Met not to print.
Why a garden gave him ten minutes.
Why he stopped painting portraits.
What he saw on a French road.
Who he was drawn to.