From the 1880's nearly until the start of World War I, by which point he had pretty much given up portraiture, John Singer Sargent was the most skillful society painter on either side of the Atlantic.
Although Americans claim him as part of the national heritage, Sargent was hardly an American, having been born and reared in Europe. His father was a doctor who gave up his comfortable Philadelphia practice to accommodate his wife's wanderlust. They moved around Europe, from one hotel or rented villa to another. Sargent lived everywhere and nowhere until settling in Paris and then, ultimately, in London. He didn't even visit America until he was 21.
Partly this may explain why the artist has always seemed to be observing a world he neither occupied nor chose to judge. His pictures are, in a sense, amoral, which made him the perfect portraitist for the Gilded Age.
He had worked in the Paris studio of the portraitist Carolus-Duran, who provided him with a role model: an artist making a lucrative career between academic orthodoxy and mild radicalism. Carolus-Duran exhorted his students to paint not from drawings, as the academics taught, but directly onto a blank canvas with a loaded brush. The goal was to affect spontaneity and swiftness.
Velazquez, the virtuoso of immediacy, was Carolus-Duran's god, as he became for Sargent and for modernists like Manet. What Carolus-Duran wanted to cultivate in his students was not the same sort of spontaneity that the modernists were aiming at. It had much more to do with pure pyrotechnics. Under Carolus-Duran, Sargent soon mastered the necessary tonal vocabulary and tricks of the wrist. His palette changed in later years, brightening. But the essential qualities of his art — a fluent shorthand and dashing control of light and shadow — were in place by the age of 22.
Sargent's virtue was to encapsulate most precisely the era's operative notion of luxe, which was unapologetic, unreflective, sublimely superficial. He was the gold standard during the Gilded Age. But he invented nothing; he changed nothing.
It has often been pointed out that Sargent, despite his mastery of pictorial artifice and special effects, was rather dull in his personal life. A creature of laborious routine, an awkward conversationalist, he seems to have been basically incurious. Contrary to the cliché, art is rarely a true mirror of an artist's life, and Sargent is further proof.
If he ever had sex with a man or woman, we don't know. He had no obvious political or religious convictions. We know he played the piano and read avidly, but as Richard Ormond, his great-nephew and one of the curators of a 1999 exhibition of Sargent at the National Gallery, writes, he "remained strangely unworldly, unbusinesslike with money (he often had to ask his patrons if they had paid him), disarmingly naive about events taking place around him and terrified of publicity and notoriety."
Like the rest of us, artists don't always know what they're best at, and they often want to be known for what they don't do well. Around 1907 Sargent largely gave up portraiture to paint earnest, unmemorable war pictures and bizarre biblical murals for the Boston Public Library, imagining himself as heir to the great public muralists and history painters of the past.
When Sargent died in 1925 at 69, he was still best known for one thing, portraiture. The war had by then changed Europe and made his embrace of the idle rich and their world of leisure and sunshine seem anachronistic; not that the idle rich had disappeared, merely that admiring them so publicly was no longer in good taste. — Michael Kimmelman