John Singer Sargent Art Prints

He was born in Florence to American parents who never settled anywhere for long, and much of his schooling came from museums and churches rather than classrooms. In Paris he trained under the portraitist Carolus-Duran, who taught painting straight onto the canvas with a loaded brush rather than building up from a careful drawing. His 1879 portrait of that teacher, shown at the Salon, was both a tribute and an advertisement for commissions.

The plan nearly came apart in 1884, when Portrait of Madame X caused a scandal at the Salon and French commissions dried up. He had even repainted the sitter's slipped shoulder strap to calm the uproar, too late to help. He settled in London's Chelsea in 1886, and the next year Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose made his name at the Royal Academy. Look at how the two girls lighting lanterns are sealed in by green foliage, with no horizon at all.

Through the 1890s he averaged fourteen portrait commissions a year, among them the languid Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, seated in a French armchair against blue Chinese silk. Lord Ribblesdale was his own idea: Sargent saw the peer speak in 1894 and asked to paint him, finishing in 1902. By 1907 he had closed his studio, joking that portraits would be amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.

Freed from sitters, he spent summers in the Swiss Alps with his sisters and nieces, who appear in pictures such as Nonchaloir (Repose). The pull away from the studio was there from the start: his early Street in Venice skips the famous sights for a backstreet, where a young woman hurries past two men watching from the shadows. Friends could still get a portrait: his 1913 picture of his old friend Henry James, painted for the novelist's seventieth birthday, was slashed by a suffragette when it went on show at the Royal Academy. In 1918 he went to the Western Front as a war artist, and Gassed shows a line of blinded soldiers led along a duckboard under an evening sky. He died in London in 1925.