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In 1898, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in London, commissioned from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron. The Wertheimer portraits reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his subjects. Even though Wertheimer bequeathed most of the paintings to the National Gallery, nowadays they are on display at the Tate Britain.

Twentieth-century portraits
By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist Max Beerbohm completed one of his seventeen caricatures of Sargent, making well known to the public the artist's paunchy physique. Although only in his forties, Sargent began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His An Interior in Venice (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their elegant palatial home, Palazzo Barbaro, was a resounding success. But, Whistler did not approve of the looseness of Sargent's brushwork, which he summed up as "smudge everywhere". One of Sargent's last major portraits in his bravura style was that of Lord Ribblesdale, in 1902, finely attired in an elegant hunting uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high productivity, which included, in addition to dozens of oil portraits, hundreds of portrait drawings at about $400 each. In 1901, he purchased the next door property to his home in Tite Street, to create a larger studio.
In 1907, at the age of fifty-one, Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved, he stated: "Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.... What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched." In that same year, Sargent painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the celebrated self-portrait collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Sargent made several summer visits to the Swiss Alps with his sisters Emily Sargent, an accomplished painter in her own right, and Violet Sargent (Mrs Ormond) and also Violet's daughters Rose-Marie and Reine, who were the subject of a number of paintings between 1906 and 1913 like The Black Brook (1908) or Nonchaloir (Repose) (1911).

By the time Sargent finished his portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity". Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emerging artistic trends including Cubism and Futurism. Sargent quietly accepted the criticism, but refused to alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted: "Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I like."
Sometime between 1917 and 1920, Sargent painted the portrait of Thomas E. McKeller, a young African-American elevator operator and WWI veteran. The canvas was kept in the painter's studio until his death and only began to be displayed permanently to the public in 1986 when it was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. McKeller also posed as a model for the mythological murals that Sargent painted at the stairway and the rotunda of the MFA Boston and for the World War I memorial murals at Harvard's Widener Library.
In 1925, shortly before he died, Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of aristocrat Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston. The painting was purchased in 1936 by the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it has been on display since then.

Watercolors
Media related to Watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent at Wikimedia Commons
During Sargent's long career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, roving from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night.
His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one reviewer noted: "Everything is given with the intensity of a dream." In the Middle East and North Africa Sargent painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fishermen. In the last decade of his life, he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

With his watercolors, Sargent was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. In watercolors, he playfully portrayed his friends and family dressed in Orientalist costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions (The Chess Game, 1906). His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Evan Charteris wrote in 1927:

To live with Sargent's water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, "the refluent shade" and "the Ambient ardours of the noon".
Although not generally accorded the critical respect given Winslow Homer, perhaps America's greatest watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique, including the methods used by Homer.

Other work
As a concession to the insatiable demand of wealthy patrons for portraits, Sargent dashed off hundreds of rapid charcoal portrait sketches, which he called "Mugs". Forty-six of these, spanning the years 1890–1916, were exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1916.
All of Sargent's murals are to be found in the Boston/Cambridge area in Massachusetts. They are in the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard's Widener Library. Sargent's largest scale works are the mural decorations Triumph of Religion that grace the Boston Public Library, depicting the history of religion and the gods of polytheism. They were attached to the walls of the library by means of marouflage. He worked on the cycle for almost thirty years but never completed the final mural. Sargent drew on his extensive travels and museum visits to create a dense art historical mélange. The murals were most recently restored in 2003–2004 by a team from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.

Sargent worked on the murals from 1895 through 1919; they were intended to show religion's (and society's) progress from pagan superstition up through the ascension of Christianity, concluding with a painting depicting Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. But Sargent's paintings of "The Church" and "The Synagogue", installed in late 1919, inspired a debate about whether the artist had represented Judaism in a stereotypical, or even an anti-Semitic, manner. Drawing upon iconography that was used in medieval paintings, Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a blind, ugly hag, and Christianity and the church as a lovely, radiant young woman. He also failed to understand how these representations might be problematic for the Jews of Boston; he was both surprised and hurt when the paintings were criticized. The paintings were objectionable to Boston Jews since they seemed to show Judaism defeated, and Christianity triumphant. The Boston newspapers also followed the controversy, noting that while many found the paintings offensive, not everyone agreed. In the end, Sargent abandoned his plan to finish the murals, and the controversy eventually died down.
Upon his return to England in 1918 after a visit to the United States, Sargent was commissioned as a war artist by the British Ministry of Information. In his large painting Gassed and in many watercolors, he depicted scenes from the Great War. Sargent had been affected by the death of his niece Rose-Marie in the shelling of the St Gervais church, Paris, on Good Friday 1918.

Relationships and personal life
Sargent was a life-long bachelor with a wide circle of friends, including Oscar Wilde (with whom he was neighbors for several years), gay author Violet Paget and his likely lover Albert de Belleroche. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent. However, recent scholarship has theorised he was a private, complex and passionate man whose homosexual identity was integral to shaping his art. This view is based on statements by his friends and associates, the general alluring remoteness of his portraits, the way his works challenge 19th-century notions of gender difference, his previously ignored male nudes, and some male portraits, including those of Thomas E. McKeller, Bartholomy Maganosco, Olimpio Fusco, and that of aristocratic artist Albert de Belleroche, which hung in his Chelsea dining room. Sargent had a long friendship with Belleroche, whom he met in 1882 and traveled with frequently. A surviving drawing suggests Sargent might have used him as a model for Madame X, following a coincidence of dates for Sargent drawing each of them separately around the same time, and the delicate pose suggestive more of Sargent's sketches of the male form than his often stiff commissions.
It has been suggested that Sargent's reputation in the 1890s as "the painter of the Jews" may have been due to his empathy with and complicit enjoyment of their mutual social foreignness. One such Jewish client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice, Sargent "was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers". The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after Sargent's death that his sex life "was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger."
He had many relationships with women. It has been suggested that those with his sitters Rosina Ferrara, Virginie Gautreau, and Judith Gautier may have tipped into infatuation. As a young man, Sargent also for a time courted Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose.
Sargent's friends and supporters included Henry James and Isabella Stewart Gardner, of both of whom he painted portraits, and Gardner also commissioned and purchased works from Sargent and sought his advice on other acquisitions. Edward VII and Paul César Helleu were also friends and supporters of Sargent. His associations also included Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. Other artists Sargent associated with were Dennis Miller Bunker, James Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey, and John Elliott (who also worked on the Boston Public Library murals), Francis David Millet, Joaquín Sorolla, and Claude Monet, whom Sargent portrayed with Monet's wife "by the edge of a wood". Between 1905 and 1914, Sargent's frequent traveling companions were the married artist couple Wilfrid de Glehn and Jane Emmet de Glehn. The trio would often spend summers in France, Spain, or Italy, and all three would depict one another in their paintings during their travels.

Critical assessment
In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which made brilliant references to Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless facility for paraphrasing the masters in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity (Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de Metz; Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, 1897, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and earned Sargent the moniker, "the Van Dyck of our times". In 1916, he was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University.
Still, during his life his work engendered negative responses from some of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer", and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry". By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe. Elizabeth Prettejohn suggests that the decline of Sargent's reputation was due partly to the rise of anti-Semitism, and the resultant intolerance of 'celebrations of Jewish prosperity.' It has been suggested that the exotic qualities inherent in his work appealed to the sympathies of the Jewish clients whom he painted from the 1890s on.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer (1908), in which the subject is seen wearing a Persian costume, a pearl encrusted turban, and strumming an Indian tambura, accoutrements all meant to convey sensuality and mystery. If Sargent used this portrait to explore issues of sexuality and identity, it seems to have met with the satisfaction of the subject's father, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer.
Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the 1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking aesthetic quality: "Wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist." And, in the 1930s, Lewis Mumford led a chorus of the severest critics: "Sargent remained to the end an illustrator ... the most adroit appearance of workmanship, the most dashing eye for effect, cannot conceal the essential emptiness of Sargent's mind, or the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of a certain part of his execution."
Part of Sargent's devaluation is also attributed to his expatriate life, which made him seem less American at a time when "authentic" socially conscious American art, as exemplified by the Stieglitz circle and by the Ashcan School, was on the ascent.
After such a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's reputation has increased steadily since the 1950s. In the 1960s, a revival of Victorian art and new scholarship directed at Sargent strengthened his reputation. Sargent has been the subject of large-scale exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986 and a major 1999 traveling show that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the National Gallery, London. In 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and in 2023 the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, California, hosted an exhibition of Sargent's paintings from Spain.
In 1986, Andy Warhol commented to Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother that Sargent "made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, every one of them has a different mood." In a Time magazine article from the 1980s, critic Robert Hughes praised Sargent as "the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both".

Later life
In 1922, Sargent co-founded New York City's Grand Central Art Galleries together with Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others. Sargent actively participated in the Grand Central Art Galleries and their academy, the Grand Central School of Art, until his death in 1925. The Galleries held a major retrospective exhibit of Sargent's work in 1924. He then returned to England, where he died at his Chelsea home on April 14, 1925, of heart disease. Sargent is interred in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.
Memorial exhibitions of Sargent's work were held in Boston in 1925, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Royal Academy and Tate Gallery in London in 1926. The Grand Central Art Galleries also organized a posthumous exhibition in 1928 of previously unseen sketches and drawings from throughout his career.

Sales
Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife was sold in 2004 for US$8.8 million and is located at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at Bentonville, Arkansas.
In December 2004, Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905) sold for US$23.5 million, nearly double the Sotheby's estimate of $12 million. The previous highest price for a Sargent painting was US$11 million.

In popular culture
In 2018, Comedy Central star Jade Esteban Estrada wrote, directed, and starred in Madame X: A Burlesque Fantasy, a stage production (premiered in San Antonio, Texas) based on the life of Sargent and his famous painting, Portrait of Madame X.
The works of Sargent feature prominently in Maggie Stiefvater's 2021 novel Mister Impossible.
In 2024, Exhibition on Screen produced a documentary John Singer Sargent: Fashion & Swagger, filmed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Tate Britain, London. It was based on the Sargent and fashion exhibits at those two museums in 2023 and 2024.
On July 13, 2024, the Des Moines Metro Opera premiered Damien Geter and Lila Palmer's "American Apollo," an opera about John Singer Sargent's supposed affair with Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890-1962), one of his favorite models.

Citations
Works cited
Adelson, Warren; Seldin Janis, Donna; Kilmurray, Elaine; Ormond, Richard; Oustinoff, Elizabeth, eds. (1997). Sargent Abroad: Figures and Landscapes. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-0-7892-0384-7.
Charteris, Evan (1927). John Sargent: With Reproductions from His Paintings and Drawings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Davis, Deborah (2003). Sargent's Women. Adelson Galleries. pp. 11–23. ISBN 0-9741621-0-8.
Davis, Deborah (2003). Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madam X. Tarcher. ASIN: B015QKNWS0.
Fairbrother, Trevor (2001). John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. Seattle Art Museum / Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08744-6.
Fairbrother, Trevor (1994). John Singer Sargent. New York: Harry N. Abrams. p. 11. ISBN 0-8109-3833-2.
Joselit, Jenna Weissman. "Restoring the American 'Sistine Chapel'". The Forward, August 13, 2010.
Khandekar, Narayan; Pocobene, Gianfranco; Smith, Kate, eds. (2009). John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library: Creation and Restoration. Harvard Art Museums / Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300122909.
Lehmann-Barclay, Lucie. "Public Art, Private Prejudice". Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2005, p. 11.
Little, Carl (1998). The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-21969-4.
"New Painting at Boston Public Library Stirs Jews to Vigorous Protest". Boston Globe, November 9, 1919, p. 48.
Noël, Benoît; Hournon, Jean. "Portrait de Madame X". Parisiana: La Capitale des arts au XIXème siècle. Paris: Les Presses Franciliennes, 2006. pp. 100–105.
Olson, Stanley (1986). John Singer Sargent: His Portrait. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-44456-7.
Ormond, Richard. "Sargent's Art". John Singer Sargent, pp. 25–7. Tate Gallery, 1998.
Ormond, Richard; Kilmurray, Elaine (1998). Sargent: Complete Paintings. Vol. 1: The Early Portraits. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07245-7.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth: Interpreting Sargent. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998, p. 9.
Rewald, John: Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, p. 183. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Further reading
Adelson, Warren; Gerdts, William H.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli; Ormond, Richard; Oustinoff, Elizabeth (2006). Sargent's Venice. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11717-2.
Avery, Kevin J. (2002). American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1835. Yale University Press. ISBN 1588390608.
Capó, Julio Jr. (2017). Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-4696-3520-0.
Cash, Sarah; Heller, Nancy G.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Ormond, Richard; Barón, Javier; Sharpe, Chloe; Southwick, Catherine (2022). Sargent and Spain. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art with Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300266467.
Corsano, Karen; Williman, Daniel (2014). John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss. Rowman & Litchfield. ISBN 978-1-4422-3050-7.
Cox, Devon (2015). The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde & Sargent in Tite Street. London: Frances Lincoln. ISBN 9780711236738.
Esten, John. John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes. New York: Universe Pub., 1999.
Fisher, Paul (2022). The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 9780374165970.
Gallati, Barbara Dayer (2015). "John Singer Sargent's International Network of Artists and Muses", in John Singer Sargent: Painting Friends. London: National Portrait Gallery. ISBN 978 1 85514 550 4.
Herdrich, Stephanie L.; Weinberg, H. Barbara (2000). American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent. Metropolitan Museum of Art / Yale University Press. ISBN 0-87099-952-4.
Mount, Charles Merrill (1955). John Singer Sargent. New York: W. W. Norton.
Ratcliff, Carter (1982). John Singer Sargent. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-673-7.
Ratcliff, Carter (2023). John Singer Sargent (Masterpiece ed.). New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-07892-1440-9.
Rubin, Stephen D. (1991). John Singer Sargent's Alpine Sketchbooks: A Young Artist's Perspective. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-19378-7.
Thomas, John (2017). Redemption Achieved: John Singer Sargent's Crucifixion of Christ with Adam and Eve and Its Place in His Work. Wolverhampton: Twin Books. ISBN 978-0-9934781-1-6.

External links

113 artworks by or after John Singer Sargent at the Art UK site
Biography, Style and Artworks
John Singer Sargent – gallery of 809 paintings

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