SARGENT, JOHN SINGER (1856-1925), Anglo-Ameri can painter. For 4o years before his death John Singer Sargent was too towering a personality for his contemporaries to judge either him or his work in true perspective. A tall commanding presence, with a small head well set on broad shoulders, with large, somewhat prominent grey eyes, kindly in expression though nothing escaped them, with a close-cut beard at a time when nine men out of io were clean-shaven, he made an instant impression upon those who came into contact with him. During the last years of his life, with his great size, his dark hair and beard turned silver-white, his florid complexion, and an air about him of singular freshness and calm, he had a look as of some serene and beneficent Jove.
That he was a great artist is universally acknowledged, but that he was a great man his life attested—in its austerity, its generous highmindedness, its breadth of vision, and above all in its independence of praise, fame or wealth.
Essentially a cosmopolitan, he was of American descent. His father, Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, was born in Gloucester, Massa chusetts, where his ancestors, emigrating from Gloucester, Eng land, settled before 1650. For his medical training Fitzwilliam Sargent went to Philadelphia, and married Miss Mary Newbold Singer, a member of an old Philadelphia family. In 1854 the young couple went for change of air and scene to Europe, with no premonition that this journey would result in their permanent establishment abroad. Two years later, on Jan. 12, 1856, in Florence, at the Casa Arretini, on the Lungarno Guicciardini, their son, John Singer Sargent, was born. He showed his special aptitudes from his earliest childhood, which was spent at Nice, in Rome, in Dresden, with periodical returns to Florence. Whenever possible he took drawing lessons of a desultory kind, interrupted by the exigencies of schooling and a life of constant travel. His mother, who all her life loved to sketch in water-colours, recog nised and encouraged his unusual gifts.
His own awakening to the enchantment of being able to express his delight in the visual world came to him, he once mentioned, at Miirren, in the summers of 1868 to 1870. His early drawings
were carefully painstaking efforts to show every variation in rock forms, or in the verdure that sprang from their crevices. In 1873 he won a prize for drawing at the Accademia in Florence.
In 1876 he paid the first of many visits to America, but before the short interruption of this trip he had begun his artistic edu cation in earnest, having entered the studio of Carolus Duran, in Paris, in 1874, at the age of eighteen.
A fellow student described him as a tall, slenderly built, rather silent youth, with a friendly, somewhat shy manner, who could, on occasions, in spite of his diffidence, express himself with startling decision. His industry was no less remarkable than his youthful strength which was not unduly taxed by the strain of attending the classes not only at Duran's studio, but the Beaux Arts and evening life classes as well.
Contrary to many published recollections, Sargent himself declared, perhaps with characteristic modesty, that he was by no means a brilliant pupil, and that he only acquired his amazing technical skill by continued concentrated effort. What he did rec ognise, with instant appreciation and lifelong acknowledgment, was the scientific precision of the method taught by Carolus Duran, who had based his theories on a close study of Franz Hals and Velasquez. John Sargent, not without struggle, made this technique his own, and it gave him, at the start, the assured mastery of his materials.
His first picture, exhibited in the Salon of 1878, won an hon ourable mention. It was called "En route pour la Peche," and is now in the Corcoran Gallery at Washington. In the next year's Salon he showed the portrait of his master, which he had painted in 1877, at the age of 21, and which was instantly ac claimed as of extraordinary promise. Shortly after, emancipated from schools, he made a pilgrimage to Spain, which he had already visited as a boy, and the studies done in the Prado Gallery, which, after his death, were sold at Christie's at such phenomenal prices, were painted on this occasion.