Circle of John Singer Sargent, 1856–1925 Portrait of an Elegant Lady in Evening Dress Holding a Fan

Circle of John Singer Sargent, 1856–1925

Portrait of an Elegant Lady in Evening Dress holding a Fan

oil on canvas

87 x 47 inches (220 x 120 cm.)

Sargent, John Singer (1856–1925), portrait and landscape painter and muralist, was born probably on 12 January 1856 in Florence, in the Casa Arretini, next to the Palazzo Sperini, in the Lungarno Acciaioli on the left bank. The family celebrated his birthday on that date but some family letters give his date of birth as 10 January. He was the eldest surviving child of American parents, Dr Fitzwilliam Sargent (1820–1889), who came from a New England shipping family, and his wife, Mary Newbold Singer (1826–1906), the only daughter of John Singer and Mary Newbold, prosperous merchants in Philadelphia.

Fitzwilliam Sargent had trained as a doctor and practised in Philadelphia; he wrote and edited medical textbooks, had begun to make investigations into the disorders of the eye, and had been appointed attending surgeon at the Wills Hospital, Philadelphia. In 1854, after the death of their first child, Mary Newbold Sargent (1851–1853), the Sargents travelled to Europe and began an expatriate existence, returning to America only for visits. Their other surviving children were Emily (1857–1936) and Violet (1870–1955). The Sargents led a cultivated, itinerant life on a modest income, spending winters in apartments or pension houses in Nice, Rome, or Florence, and summers in cities and resorts in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Sargent's education was informal, even haphazard, but it was intensively cultural and cosmopolitan. He grew up speaking French, Italian, and German, in addition to English, was widely read and an accomplished pianist, and he developed a passionate interest in art and architecture.

Mrs Sargent, a keen watercolourist, ardent Europhile, and cultural romantic, encouraged her son's precocious artistic talent. Sargent studied briefly at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, but in May 1874 went to Paris, then the undisputed capital of the art world, in search of professional artistic training. He entered the independent atelier of the fashionable portrait painter Charles-Emile-Auguste Durand, styled Carolus-Duran (1838–1917), at 81 boulevard Montparnasse, and enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts to study drawing from casts and from life. Carolus-Duran was a friend of Edouard Manet and of Claude Monet, and was regarded by his contemporaries as a progressive. He was an advocate of direct, realistic painting and taught his students to work au premier coup (at the first touch), working with a loaded brush, applying wet paint into wet paint, a technique that encouraged a broad, painterly style. Sargent passed the concours des places (the exams in perspective and anatomy, ornament, and life drawing) and matriculated at the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1874, and again in January 1875 and March 1877. By August 1875 he was sharing a rented studio on the Left Bank, 73 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, near the Luxembourg Gardens, with the American artist James Carroll Beckwith.

Sargent made his début at the Paris Salon in 1877 with a portrait of a family friend, Frances Sherburne Ridley Watts (Philadelphia Museum of Art). In the same year Carolus-Duran invited him to assist with work on a commission for a ceiling decoration for the Luxembourg Palace. The finished ceiling, Gloria Mariae Medicis, which includes portraits of Carolus-Duran by Sargent and vice versa, was shown at the Salon in 1878 and is now installed in the Musée du Louvre. The ceiling project also led Carolus-Duran to agree to sit to Sargent, and Sargent exhibited a formal portrait of Carolus-Duran at the Salon in 1879 (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts), a painting that performed the dual function of paying homage to his master and declaring independence from him. Like Manet and other artists of his generation, Carolus-Duran had travelled to Spain and fall