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Artist
American expatriate painter whose bravura brushwork and psychological acuity made him the preeminent portrait artist of the Gilded Age.
157 works in the NGA collection
Search John Singer Sargent worksJohn Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was born in Florence to American parents and spent his life moving between European cities. The Paris Salon of 1884 nearly ended his career: the portrait now known as Madame X was received as an indecency, and he relocated to London, where the same fluency that had scandalised Paris made him the most sought-after portraitist of his generation.
By around 1907 he was refusing most portrait commissions and travelling to paint for himself, largely in watercolour. These are the Sargents that reward browsing rather than reverence: Alpine streams, Venetian doorways, marble quarries, Bedouin camps, army camps in the First World War, and the architecture and light of Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean, which he visited repeatedly while working on the Boston Public Library murals.
The National Gallery of Art's Sargent collection reflects that second career, weighted toward watercolours and drawings from his travels rather than the society portraits, so browsing it looks very little like the standard Sargent monograph.
Studies of Generals Plumer and Haig for "General Officers of World War I" [recto]
1920-1922
Collection data via NGA Open Access (CC0)
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