John_Singer_Sargent

John Singer Sargent Perhaps one of the most well-known painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent specialized in portraiture of the more influential and well off men and women of the era. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, actress Ellen Terry and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sruck their best poses for him. Raised in Europe by an American emigrant family, Sargent attended art schools in Paris. Extremely gifted, he soon received lessons from the old masters, the contemporary Impressionists and the Spanish painters Velázquez and Goya, producing a spectacular array of exciting and masterful paintings while only in his 20s. At the 1884 Paris Salon, however, his portrait of the 23-year-old American Virginie Gautreau, shown with bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment. The picture, which became known as Madame X, crippled Sargent's hopes of establishing himself as a portrait painter in Paris. In 1886 he moved to London, and portrait, paris, sargent, painter, brush, towards, shown, producing, portraiture, paintings, painters, one, lighter, john, find, colors, became, art, american, always, years, work, woodrow, women, wilson, whom, while, where’d, well-known, watercolors, watercolor, warm, virginie, very, velázquez