Elegant and flattering, Sargent’s portraits also excelled at captured complex nuances of the sitters’ personalities. In London, Sargent became the leading portrait painter among upper class families-both British and American. The frank sensuality of “Madame X” stirred up so much controversy that Sargent left Paris for London, thereafter his permanent home base. The award was the first of many prizes and honors.Īmong Sargent’s early commissions were “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” (1882 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and full-length portrait of society beauty Madame Pierre Gautreau titled “Madame X” (1884 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). C.) launched his public career when it won honorable mention at the 1878 Salon in Paris. One of these paintings, “Oyster Gathers of Cancale” (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, as he began to establish himself as a Paris-based portraitist, Sargent traveled to Brittany, Venice, and other locales where he painted scenes of street and folk life. Sargent traveled to the United States for the first time in 1876-the trip allowed him to claim his American citizenship. In October 1874 he gained acceptance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study drawing at the same time, he continued his training with Carolus-Duran. Although Carolus-Duran’s aesthetic and practices strongly shaped Sargent’s style, the young artist was also eager to sharpen his natural talent for draftsmanship. In Paris, Sargent was quickly accepted into the studio of Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand, (known as Carolus-Duran), a master of portraiture who was known among French academic painters for his fluid brushwork and unorthodox practice of painting tonal masses and planes directly on canvas instead of painting from preparatory sketches. The Sargent family supported his decision to become an artist by moving to Paris in 1874 so that he could pursue further training. He later enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. As a teenager in Rome, he studied with German-American painter Carl Welsch. Sargent, their eldest surviving child, grew up amid the finest art and culture Europe had to offer, and he displayed a precocious talent for drawing. At the behest of his wife, Mary, FitzWilliam Sargent abandoned his career as a surgeon to travel continually from one European city to the next. Both of Sargent’s parents came from well-connected, wealthy families in New England and Philadelphia. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856 to American expatriate parents. In addition to his commissioned portraits, he completed several high-profile mural projects in the Boston area and deftly captured the landscapes and architecture of Europe in hundreds of impressionistic plein-air watercolors. Gifted with both technical dexterity and a brilliant sense of mood, color, and light, John Singer Sargent achieved fame and fortune in Europe and the United States as the preeminent society portraitist of the Gilded Age.
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