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John Singer Sargent
(1856-1925)
Born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American
parents, John Singer Sargent received his first
formal art instruction in Rome in 1868, and
sporadically attended the Accademia delle
Belle Arti in Florence between 1870 and 1873. In
1874 he was accepted at the Paris studio of the
portraitist Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran, and the
next fall entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to
study drawing. He began to exhibit at the Salon
in 1877.
During the 1870s and 1880s, Sargent painted
genre scenes, based in part on his travels to
Spain and Venice, but it was his remarkable skills
as a portraitist upon which his reputation rested.
The scandal caused by Sargent's daring portrait
of Madame Gautreau at the Salon of 1884
precipitated his departure to London the
following year.
By the turn of the century Sargent was
recognized as the most acclaimed international
society portraitist of the Edwardian era, and his
clientele included the most affluent, aristocratic,
and fashionable people of his time. Sargent
chafed in later life at the limitations of portraiture,
and around the turn of the century he worked
increasingly at other subjects and in other
mediums, particularly watercolor, in which he
was extraordinarily gifted.
Although an expatriate who lived in London,
Sargent was committed to America's cultural
development and executed important mural
decorations for the Boston Public Library (1890 -
1919), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1916 -
1925), and Harvard University's Widener Library
(1921 - 1922). He died in London in 1925.
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