John Singer Sargent
 Born in Florence, the first son of a New England surgeon and the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant, he became the leading portrait and figure painter of subjects in international society during the Gilded Age. Late in his career, he was a leading proponent of watercolor as a respectable medium for finished work.
His parents lived in Europe most of their lives and as a result of his multicultural experiences traveling with his parents, young Sargent was able to speak many different languages. He showed early talent in art and was encouraged by his mother, an amateur painter. At age twelve, in Rome, he studied with Carl Welsh, a German-American artist and in 1870 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In Paris, he was accepted in 1874 at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but switched to the less academically oriented atelier of Carolus Duran, who had major impact on Sargent's style. Duran was an adventurous portrait painter who blended realism with a certain freedom of style.
Sargent was also affected by portrait style of Velasquez, the Tonalism or mood painting of James Whistler and Impressionism of Edgar Degas. He spent time at Monet's home town of Giverny, absorbing the Impressionist style and cultivationg a friendship and mutual respect between the two artists.
Sargent's career was jeopardized in Paris after his painting Portrait of Mme X, 1884, because it was a startlingly accurate portrayal of a notoriously beautiful woman who was, in fact, Sargent's cousin. Some said the pose was provocative, but aside from the reputation of the subject, there seems to be little critical reason to find the work controverisal.
From 1885 until 1925, Sargent lived primarily in London where his career as a portrait painter was highly successful, but he traveled frequently to the United States where he also had man portrait commissions, especially from upper class Bostonians. However by 1908, he was expressing much tiredness with the demands on his talents and the need to flatter his subjects. He began to limit himself to charcoal portrait sketches and painted murals. In the early 1980's he began a twenty five year mural project for the Boston Public Library.
His last years he devoted to Impressionist watercolors of European Scenes and architecture. He found watercolor to be the most pleasurable outlet for his tremendous energy and compulsion to sketch what he saw. John Singer Sargent died in London in 1925.
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