John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was born in Florence to American parents and grew up travelling around Europe with them. In Paris he trained under Carolus-Duran, whose method of painting directly with a loaded brush was pivotal to his development, and he also studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and took some lessons from Léon Bonnat. He moved to London in the mid-1880s and died there in 1925. Madame X, shown at the Paris Salon of 1884, caused a scandal that likely prompted the move; he later judged it the best thing he had done. In England his first major success came in 1887 with Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, painted on the spot in a garden at Broadway in the Cotswolds and bought at once for the Tate. Through the 1890s he averaged fourteen portrait commissions a year. In later life he turned increasingly to watercolour, to the Triumph of Religion murals for the Boston Public Library, and, as a war artist, to Gassed. Two works here: Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and Madame X.