John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was born in Florence to American parents and trained in Paris under Carolus-Duran. The scandal of Madame X at the 1884 Salon, where a painted shoulder strap was judged indecent, drove him to London, and there he became the portraitist Edwardian society competed to sit for. He could suggest a silk sleeve or a turned wrist in a few loaded strokes, and he charged accordingly. By 1907 he had grown tired of what he called a pimp's profession and largely abandoned commissioned portraits for watercolour, landscape and the mural cycles at the Boston Public Library. As a war artist in 1918 he produced Gassed, his largest and bleakest canvas. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his work, free to preview and available as originals for printing.