SARGENT, JOHN SINGER

born Jan. 12, 1856, Florence died April 15, 1925, London, Eng. Italian-born American painter whose elegant portraits created an enduring image of society of the Edwardian age. The wealthy and privileged on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean came to his studio to be immortalized. Sargent was brought up abroad and first saw the United States in 1876, when he established citizenship. Serious and reserved, he had a talent for drawing, and in 1874 he went to Paris to study painting with Carolus-Duran, a fashionable society portraitist. In 1879 Sargent traveled to Madrid to study the works of Diego Velzquez and to Haarlem to see the works of Frans Hals. Some critics believe that his best work, in a rich, dark palette, was done in the years immediately after this trip. At the Salon of 1884, Sargent showed what is probably his best-known picture, Madame X, the portrait of Madame Gautreau, a famous Parisian beauty. Sargent regarded it as his masterpiece and was disagreeably surprised when it caused a scandalcritics found it eccentric and erotic. Discouraged by his Parisian failure, Sargent moved permanently to London. His work was probably too continental and avant-garde to appeal immediately to English taste; The Misses Vickers (1884) was voted worst picture of the year by the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886. It was not until 1887, when Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (188586), a study of two little girls lighting Japanese lanterns, captured the hearts of the British public, that he began to experience the phenomenal acclaim in England and the United States that was to be his for the rest of his life. Sargent's broad, slashing brushstrokes and brilliant palette evoke the accidental and a sense of the particular moment. He was surprisingly unrepetitive, responding to each sitter differently. His best portraits capture his subjects in a revealing, off-guard moment. After 1910 Sargent gave up portraiture and devoted the rest of his life to painting murals and Alpine and Italian landscapes in watercolour. With stenographic brilliance Sargent pursued transparency and fluidity beyond J.M.W. Turner and Winslow Homer, sometimes becoming prophetically or accidentally Expressionistic, as in Mountain Fire (1895). From 1890 to 1910 he worked on a commission for the Boston Public Library to execute murals on a history of the Jewish and Christian religions. He also executed murals in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Additional reading Evan Charteris, John Sargent (1927, reprinted 1972); Charles Merill Mount, John Singer Sargent, 3rd ed. (1969); and Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent, His Portrait (1986), are primarily biographies. Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors (1970); Carter Ratcliff, John Singer Sargent (1982); and Patricia Hills, John Singer Sargent (1986), an exhibition catalog, all focus on his art.