
John Singer Sargent Painting Reproductions 4 of 12
1856-1925
American Impressionist Painter
Born in Florence in 1856 to American parents who had relinquished the conventions of settled life, John Singer Sargent was destined from the beginning to absorb rather than simply observe European culture. His cosmopolitan upbringing, shaped by a peripatetic family existence across France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, exposed him to the Old Masters and to continental artistic traditions at an unusually early age. This itinerant education, orchestrated in large part by his mother, formed the foundation of a dazzling career in which geographical displacement became a constant but also a wellspring of inspiration.
Sargent’s technical proficiency, recognized almost immediately, was not the result of formal schooling alone. Encouraged to draw by his amateur-artist mother, he displayed from childhood a remarkable observational acuity. His sketchbooks, replete with copied illustrations of ships, landscapes, and figures, signaled an already discerning eye. By adolescence he had studied briefly under the German painter Carl Welsch, and later, decisively, under the charismatic Carolus-Duran in Paris. Carolus-Duran's emphasis on direct brushwork, learned from Velázquez, liberated Sargent from the laborious constraints of academic underpainting. He would remain loyal to this method throughout his life.
Although he passed the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1874, it was under Carolus-Duran’s mentorship that Sargent flourished, absorbing the techniques that would distinguish him among his contemporaries. While other Americans trained in Paris remained faithful to neoclassical rigor or adopted Impressionist idioms, Sargent navigated an independent path, displaying at once an academic precision and an exuberant immediacy of touch.
His early travels to Venice, Spain, and North Africa were formative. They enlarged his sense of scale, intensified his preoccupation with light, and offered subjects that nourished his dual impulse toward realism and exoticism. The Spanish trip in particular, and his fascination with Velázquez, was to yield both aesthetic revelation and compositional discipline. It also resulted in the arresting theatricality of "El Jaleo" - a painting as audacious in conception as it was in execution.
Sargent’s portraiture quickly earned him the attention of the Paris Salon, where he debuted with works that were at once elegant, probing, and fluently realized. But it was "Portrait of Madame X" (1884) that marked a pivotal juncture. Intended as a bold assertion of Sargent’s fluency in society portraiture, it instead provoked scandal - not for any impropriety of paint, but for the psychological candour and haughty sensuality of the sitter. The fallout prompted Sargent’s strategic relocation to London.
London proved fertile ground. There, Sargent found patrons, friends, and the necessary insulation to refine his grand manner. While the English press initially resisted what they perceived as a Parisian flashiness, Sargent’s fluency in both composition and character soon won them over. By the 1890s, he was producing portraits at a punishing rate, yet never descending into mere formula. Whether portraying socialites, statesmen, or fellow artists, Sargent captured both surface and spirit. Few painters since Van Dyck had demonstrated such mastery in conjuring not only likeness, but a sitter’s presence within space.
Yet even as his portraits flourished, Sargent grew weary of their constraints. He began to withdraw from commissions, devoting increasing energy to watercolors and mural work. These parallel bodies of work, long considered secondary, have since become central to his reputation. In them, Sargent allowed his painterly instincts fuller rein. The watercolors, luminous and immediate, speak to his love of travel and to an eye constantly alert to architecture, gesture, and pattern. The murals - especially those at the Boston Public Library - reveal an ambition toward synthesis, an attempt to marry narrative and decoration on a monumental scale.
By the early 20th century, Sargent’s reputation was both formidable and, increasingly, out of step with modernism. Younger critics, intoxicated by abstraction, dismissed his work as facile, decorative, or insincere. Roger Fry famously argued that Sargent lacked aesthetic conviction. Yet it is precisely the fusion of surface brilliance and psychological subtlety that constitutes Sargent’s distinctive voice. His portraits, particularly of women, resist caricature; they are elegant, often enigmatic, and always constructed with deliberate intelligence.
Recent decades have brought a reevaluation. The private sketches, male nudes, and informal studies once excluded from critical discussion now offer a more complex vision of the artist. They suggest a painter deeply invested in questions of identity, of gender ambiguity, of the ways in which pose can mask or reveal character. They also confirm that Sargent was not simply an observer of his era’s elite, but a participant in its aesthetic and emotional contradictions.
John Singer Sargent died in London in 1925. His studio, meticulously organized, remained a testament to his lifelong discipline. In death, as in life, Sargent defied categorization. He was a technician of rare command, a chronicler of elegance, and - above all - an artist who understood the pleasures and perils of surface, and who never confused style for substance.
Sargent’s technical proficiency, recognized almost immediately, was not the result of formal schooling alone. Encouraged to draw by his amateur-artist mother, he displayed from childhood a remarkable observational acuity. His sketchbooks, replete with copied illustrations of ships, landscapes, and figures, signaled an already discerning eye. By adolescence he had studied briefly under the German painter Carl Welsch, and later, decisively, under the charismatic Carolus-Duran in Paris. Carolus-Duran's emphasis on direct brushwork, learned from Velázquez, liberated Sargent from the laborious constraints of academic underpainting. He would remain loyal to this method throughout his life.
Although he passed the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1874, it was under Carolus-Duran’s mentorship that Sargent flourished, absorbing the techniques that would distinguish him among his contemporaries. While other Americans trained in Paris remained faithful to neoclassical rigor or adopted Impressionist idioms, Sargent navigated an independent path, displaying at once an academic precision and an exuberant immediacy of touch.
His early travels to Venice, Spain, and North Africa were formative. They enlarged his sense of scale, intensified his preoccupation with light, and offered subjects that nourished his dual impulse toward realism and exoticism. The Spanish trip in particular, and his fascination with Velázquez, was to yield both aesthetic revelation and compositional discipline. It also resulted in the arresting theatricality of "El Jaleo" - a painting as audacious in conception as it was in execution.
Sargent’s portraiture quickly earned him the attention of the Paris Salon, where he debuted with works that were at once elegant, probing, and fluently realized. But it was "Portrait of Madame X" (1884) that marked a pivotal juncture. Intended as a bold assertion of Sargent’s fluency in society portraiture, it instead provoked scandal - not for any impropriety of paint, but for the psychological candour and haughty sensuality of the sitter. The fallout prompted Sargent’s strategic relocation to London.
London proved fertile ground. There, Sargent found patrons, friends, and the necessary insulation to refine his grand manner. While the English press initially resisted what they perceived as a Parisian flashiness, Sargent’s fluency in both composition and character soon won them over. By the 1890s, he was producing portraits at a punishing rate, yet never descending into mere formula. Whether portraying socialites, statesmen, or fellow artists, Sargent captured both surface and spirit. Few painters since Van Dyck had demonstrated such mastery in conjuring not only likeness, but a sitter’s presence within space.
Yet even as his portraits flourished, Sargent grew weary of their constraints. He began to withdraw from commissions, devoting increasing energy to watercolors and mural work. These parallel bodies of work, long considered secondary, have since become central to his reputation. In them, Sargent allowed his painterly instincts fuller rein. The watercolors, luminous and immediate, speak to his love of travel and to an eye constantly alert to architecture, gesture, and pattern. The murals - especially those at the Boston Public Library - reveal an ambition toward synthesis, an attempt to marry narrative and decoration on a monumental scale.
By the early 20th century, Sargent’s reputation was both formidable and, increasingly, out of step with modernism. Younger critics, intoxicated by abstraction, dismissed his work as facile, decorative, or insincere. Roger Fry famously argued that Sargent lacked aesthetic conviction. Yet it is precisely the fusion of surface brilliance and psychological subtlety that constitutes Sargent’s distinctive voice. His portraits, particularly of women, resist caricature; they are elegant, often enigmatic, and always constructed with deliberate intelligence.
Recent decades have brought a reevaluation. The private sketches, male nudes, and informal studies once excluded from critical discussion now offer a more complex vision of the artist. They suggest a painter deeply invested in questions of identity, of gender ambiguity, of the ways in which pose can mask or reveal character. They also confirm that Sargent was not simply an observer of his era’s elite, but a participant in its aesthetic and emotional contradictions.
John Singer Sargent died in London in 1925. His studio, meticulously organized, remained a testament to his lifelong discipline. In death, as in life, Sargent defied categorization. He was a technician of rare command, a chronicler of elegance, and - above all - an artist who understood the pleasures and perils of surface, and who never confused style for substance.
272 Sargent Paintings

Palazzo Labia and San Geremia, Venice 1913
Oil Painting
$964
$964
SKU: SAR-1774
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

Girl Fishing 1913
Oil Painting
$949
$949
SKU: SAR-1775
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

The Sketchers 1914
Oil Painting
$1059
$1059
Canvas Print
$65.54
$65.54
SKU: SAR-1776
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 55.9 x 71.1 cm
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 55.9 x 71.1 cm
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, USA

The Artist Sketching 1922
Oil Painting
$1041
$1041
SKU: SAR-1777
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

Life Study (Study of an Egyptian Girl) 1891
Oil Painting
$1333
$1333
Canvas Print
$55.44
$55.44
SKU: SAR-1778
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 190.5 x 61 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 190.5 x 61 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, USA

Miss Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth 1889
Oil Painting
$1262
$1262
Canvas Print
$55.44
$55.44
SKU: SAR-1779
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 221 x 114.3 cm
Tate Gallery, London, UK
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 221 x 114.3 cm
Tate Gallery, London, UK

Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler (Mrs John Jay Chapman) 1893
Oil Painting
$1201
$1201
Canvas Print
$68.45
$68.45
SKU: SAR-1780
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 125.4 x 102.8 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 125.4 x 102.8 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, USA

Mrs. Hugh Hammersley 1892
Oil Painting
$1215
$1215
Canvas Print
$77.72
$77.72
SKU: SAR-1781
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 205.7 x 115.6 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 205.7 x 115.6 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

The Breakfast Table 1884
Oil Painting
$746
$746
Canvas Print
$67.50
$67.50
SKU: SAR-1782
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 54 x 45 cm
Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 54 x 45 cm
Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA

Mrs. Henry White 1883
Oil Painting
$1409
$1409
Canvas Print
$55.44
$55.44
SKU: SAR-1783
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 225 x 143.5 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 225 x 143.5 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA

Street in Venice c.1880/82
Oil Painting
$959
$959
Canvas Print
$62.04
$62.04
SKU: SAR-1784
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 75 x 52.4 cm
The Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 75 x 52.4 cm
The Clark Art Institute, Massachusetts, USA

Portrait of Pauline Astor c.1898
Oil Painting
$1978
$1978
SKU: SAR-7964
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: unknown
Private Collection

A Window in the Vatican 1906
Oil Painting
$738
$738
SKU: SAR-11670
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 71 x 56 cm
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 71 x 56 cm
Private Collection

Maud Glen Coats, Duchess of Wellington 1906
Oil Painting
$1165
$1165
SKU: SAR-13380
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 106.8 x 78.8 cm
Private Collection
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 106.8 x 78.8 cm
Private Collection

Egyptians Raising Water from the Nile c.1890/91
Oil Painting
$652
$652
Canvas Print
$69.83
$69.83
SKU: SAR-15164
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 63.5 x 53.3 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 63.5 x 53.3 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Man with Red Drapery a.1900
Paper Art Print
$52.92
$52.92
SKU: SAR-15165
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 36.5 x 53.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 36.5 x 53.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Venetian Passageway c.1905
Paper Art Print
$52.92
$52.92
SKU: SAR-15166
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 53.8 x 36.8 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 53.8 x 36.8 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Tyrolese Interior 1915
Oil Painting
$922
$922
Canvas Print
$66.00
$66.00
SKU: SAR-15167
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 71.4 x 56 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 71.4 x 56 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Two Girls with Parasols 1888
Oil Painting
$784
$784
Canvas Print
$70.74
$70.74
SKU: SAR-15168
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 74.9 x 63.5 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 74.9 x 63.5 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Two Girls on a Lawn c.1889
Oil Painting
$658
$658
Canvas Print
$68.45
$68.45
SKU: SAR-15169
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 53.7 x 64 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 53.7 x 64 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Portrait of William Merritt Chase 1902
Oil Painting
$999
$999
Canvas Print
$55.44
$55.44
SKU: SAR-15170
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 158.8 x 105 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 158.8 x 105 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes 1897
Oil Painting
$1279
$1279
Canvas Print
$65.09
$65.09
SKU: SAR-15171
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 214 x 101 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 214 x 101 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Schreckhorn, Eismeer (Splendid Mountain) 1870
Paper Art Print
$52.92
$52.92
SKU: SAR-15172
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 27.6 x 40.6 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 27.6 x 40.6 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA

Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt) 1882
Oil Painting
$1243
$1243
Canvas Print
$73.37
$73.37
SKU: SAR-15173
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 213.4 x 113.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
John Singer Sargent
Original Size: 213.4 x 113.7 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA