Magnolias

Sargent was born in Florence to American parents who moved constantly around Europe, and he grew up fluent in several languages without ever living anywhere long. He trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran, who taught him to work directly onto the canvas without underdrawing, and that habit never left him. The Madame X affair is the hinge of his career. The portrait he showed at the 1884 Salon, with its pale skin and one fallen strap, caused enough scandal that he left Paris for London. It now hangs in the Metropolitan and looks entirely decorous, which says more about 1884 than about the painting. For twenty-five years he was the portraitist wealthy people wanted, and he grew to resent it. By 1907 he was refusing most commissions. The later work, watercolours made travelling in Italy and the Alps, and the murals for the Boston Public Library, is looser and more private. He also painted Gassed in 1919, after visiting the Western Front, which is nothing like anything else he made.