How John Singer Sargent Became the Gilded Age’s Most Famous Portrait Painter

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) is justifiably known for his gauzy renditions of beautiful belle epoque socialites. “To have been painted by [Sargent] added distinction to the most distinguished,” wrote one critic in a 1925 obituary. But before he became the hottest portrait painter in France—and eventually the UK and the US—Sargent had to establish himself as both a member of the cultural elite and a painter of unmatched talent. The only place to do that, in his mind at least, was the Paris Salon.

When Sargent first arrived in Paris, he was an ambitious unknown. “He gets to Paris, he enrolls in art lessons, he is young and energetic and really establishes himself in different circles,” says Stephanie Herdrich, the Alice Pratt Brown curator of American painting and drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and co-curator of Sargent and Paris, a sweeping new show at the museum.

“He figures out pretty quickly how to make his work stand out at the Paris Salon,” Herdrich says, referring to the juried forum where thousands of artists (both unknown and famous) would hang new work. “And that’s really the main venue where he’s intent on establishing himself, where he has so much exposure. And pretty quickly he realizes he has to be bold to get his paintings noticed among the thousands of others.”