John Singer Sargent born 12 January 1856 (d. 1925)John Singer Sargent was the most successful portrait painter of his era, as well as a gifted landscape painter and watercolorist. Sargent was born in Florence, Italy to American parents.
Sargent studied in Italy and Germany, and then in Paris under Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran.
In the early 1880s Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly full-length portrayals of women: Madame Edouard Pailleron in 1880, Madame Ramón Subercaseaux in 1881, and Lady with the Rose, 1882. Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent's great influences.
Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits. Many of his most important works are in museums in the US. Sargent made numerous visits to the United States in the last decade of his life, including a stay of two full years from 1915-1917.
In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practised his own form of Realism, which brilliantly referenced Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless ability to create portraits worthy of the masters but in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity. Still, during his life his work engendered critical responses from some of his colleagues, who regarded his work as highly competent but overly traditional. By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe. Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the 1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking aesthetic quality.
Despite a long period of critical disfavour, Sargent's popularity has increased steadily since the 1960s, and Sargent has been the subject of recent large-scale exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986, and a 1999 'blockbuster' travelling show that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the National Gallery, London.
Sargent was extremely private regarding his personal life, although the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after his death that Sargent's sex life 'was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.' The truth of this may never be established. Some scholars have also suggested that Sargent was homosexual. He had personal associations with Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. His male nudes reveal complex and well-considered artistic sensibilities about the male physique and male sensuality. However, there were many friendships with women, as well, and a similar sensualism informs his female portrait and figure studies - he was simply a very gifted painter. His career doesn't show the same kind of bias in subject matter as Henry Scott Tuke, for example. The likelihood of an affair with Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose, is accepted by Sargent scholars.John Singer Sargent is interred in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.
Portrait of Madame X (1884) Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892) National Galleries of Scotland
Ena and Betty, Daughters of Asher and Mrs Wertheimer (1901) Tate Gallery
Dr Pozzi at Home (1881) Hammer Museum
John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery