John Singer Sargent

The most technically dazzling portraitist of the Gilded Age and the Edwardian era, and the artist whose virtuoso brushwork came closest to dissolving the boundary between Impressionism and academic portraiture. Born in Florence to American parents who had moved abroad permanently, educated in Paris under Carolus-Duran, Sargent absorbed the lessons of Velázquez — the painter he most admired — through obsessive copying at the Prado. His early Paris work showed an ease and confidence that was compared, not always positively, to a conjuring trick. The scandal that defined his career came in 1884, when his portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau — a socially prominent American expatriate shown in a black dress with one strap slipped from her shoulder — caused an outcry at the Salon. The painting was eventually retitled Madame X and the offending strap repainted vertical, but Sargent's Paris reputation was effectively ended. He moved to London, where his fluid, immediate portraits of Edwardian society made him the most sought-after portraitist on either side of the Atlantic and eventually exhausted him: by his early fifties he was refusing portrait commissions entirely, declaring himself done with 'paughtraiture.' The rest of his long career was spent on ambitious mural projects for Boston institutions (the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts) and, above all, on private watercolor travels through the Alps, Venice and the Middle East. These watercolors — loose, luminous, made quickly in the field with no pretension to commission or sale — are now considered as important as the formal portraits. He died in his sleep in 1925, the night before sailing for America.