John Singer Sargent

His parents left Philadelphia in 1854 after their first child died at two, and never lived there again. FitzWilliam Sargent gave up an eye surgeon's practice because his wife Mary had broken down and the cure was Europe. A cholera epidemic stopped them in Florence, where their son was born in January 1856. Then they kept moving: winters in Nice or Rome, summers in the Alps. Attempts to school him failed. He grew up with four languages, a pianist's hands, and American citizenship in a country he had not yet seen. In May 1874, at 18, he walked into Carolus-Duran's Paris atelier and learned to lay paint on canvas at the first touch, the method Velazquez had used. He went to the Prado in 1879 to copy him.

Consider what he was. Born in Italy, trained in France, resident in England from 1886 until he died there, he never lived in the United States for more than a stretch of months at a time. And he painted America's ruling class, refused a knighthood in 1907 rather than surrender his citizenship, and put his largest works on the walls of the Boston Public Library. Roughly 900 oils and more than 2,000 watercolours. In nine months of 1890 he painted some 40 portraits, and by the middle of that decade he was working through three sitters a day.

He asked for the commission. Virginie Gautreau was a New Orleans-born socialite married to a Paris banker, and Sargent wrote to a mutual friend that she should be told he was a man of prodigious talent. He worked at it for a year and hung it at the 1884 Salon as Portrait de Mme ***. The pallor read as corpse-like. One strap had slipped off her right shoulder, and a critic in Le Figaro wrote that one more struggle would set the lady free. Gautreau and her mother came to his studio in tears and asked him to withdraw it. He refused, then repainted the strap upright. The French commissions stopped. He kept the canvas for 32 years. Selling it to the Metropolitan in 1916, he told the director he supposed it was the best thing he had ever done.

Around 1907 he shut the portrait studio. He was 51, and by one account he called the trade a pimp's profession. What followed was watercolour by the thousand, the Boston murals, and in 1918 a war commission that sent him to the Western Front at 62. On August 21 he watched gassed men being led to a dressing station near Arras, and painted Gassed, 20 feet of blinded soldiers, voted picture of the year at the Royal Academy in 1919. It did not save him. Roger Fry, reviewing the 1926 retrospective, wrote that the wonder was that anyone had confused the performance with art, and Lewis Mumford called his mind empty. The rehabilitation began with the Whitney retrospective in 1986.

John Singer Sargent's life against the full span of the corpus.

• El Jaleo artwork
  The hit of the Paris Salon, out of his 1879 Spanish trip. Now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 1882
• The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit artwork
  Four girls in a darkened Paris hall, built on Velazquez 1882
• Portrait of Madame X artwork
  Shown at the Salon as Portrait de Mme ***. Sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916 1884
• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose artwork
  Painted out of doors at Broadway in Worcestershire and bought for the nation in 1887 1886
• Triumph of Religion artwork
  Boston Public Library murals, commissioned in 1890 and abandoned unfinished after the Synagogue panel drew protest 1919
• Gassed artwork
  Voted picture of the year at the Royal Academy. Imperial War Museum, London 1919

• January 12, 1856 aged 0 Born in Florence to American parents who were only passing through A cholera epidemic had stopped them there. They had left Philadelphia two years earlier and never resettled.
• May 1874 aged 18 Enters Carolus-Duran's atelier in Paris at 18 He passed the entrance exam for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts on his first attempt the same year.
• 1879 aged ~23 Goes to Spain to copy Velazquez at the Prado Tangier followed the next year. The trip produced El Jaleo and a lifelong debt to Spanish painting.
• 1882 aged ~26 El Jaleo makes him the most talked-about painter at the Salon
• 1884 aged ~28 Portrait de Mme *** is jeered at the Salon and the French commissions dry up He told Edmund Gosse the following year that he had considered giving up painting for music or business.
• 1886 aged ~30 Moves to London and takes Whistler's old studio in Tite Street English critics called his handling beastly French.
• 1890 aged ~34 Chosen to decorate the new Boston Public Library He worked on the cycle for the rest of his life and never finished it.
• August 21, 1918 aged 62 Watches gassed men led to a dressing station near Arras He had gone to the Western Front as an official war artist at 62. Gassed came out of that evening.
• April 14, 1925 aged 69 Dies of heart disease at his Chelsea home He is buried at Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.

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