John Singer Sargent was born in Florence in January John Singer Sargent

John Sargent was given little regular schooling. As a result of his "Baedeker education," he learned Italian, French, and German. He studied geography, arithmetic, reading, and other disciplines under his father's tutelage. He also became an accomplished pianist. His mother, an amateur artist, encouraged him to draw, and her wanderlust furnished him with subjects. He enrolled for his first-documented formal art training during the winter of 1873–74 at the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence. In spring 1874, Fitzwilliam Sargent resolved to nourish his son's talent in Paris, which had become the world's most powerful magnet for art students.

In May 1874, Sargent entered the teaching atelier of a youthful, stylish painter, Carolus- Duran, a leading portraitist in France who encouraged his students to paint immediately (rather than make preliminary drawings), and to preserve the freshness of the sketch in completed works. He also exhorted them to study artists who demonstrated painterly freedom: Frans Hals and Rembrandt; Sir Anthony van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds; and, above all others, the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. The young American moved close to his teacher stylistically and became his protégé. There is almost no work by Sargent, beginning with his successful submissions to the Paris Salons as early as 1877, that does not reflect the manner of Carolus-Duran or the old masters of the painterly tradition. Spanish Dancer by John Singer Sargent

In May 1876, accompanied by his mother and his sister Emily, Sargent began his first trip to the United States, which would include visits to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and the Niagara Falls. By autumn 1879, no longer attending classes regularly and concentrating on building his career, Sargent began a period of extensive travel to view works by the old masters and to gather ideas for pictures, visiting Spain, Holland, and Venice. John Singer Sargent in his studio with Portrait of Madame X

Picturesque locales prompted Sargent to paint genre scenes, which he showed alongside his portraits as he built his reputation. Some of his sun-drenched canvases of the late 1870s bespeak the influence of Claude Monet, whom Sargent seems to have met in Paris as early as 1876 at the second Impressionist exhibition. Frederick Law Olmsted, 1895

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw by John Singer Sargent, 1893 After the turn of the century, Sargent grew tired of the demands of portrait painting. He was constantly preoccupied with mural paintings for the Boston Public Library, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University, for which he had received a series of commissions beginning in Travel studies in watercolour also came to occupy more of his time and became a new source of critical and financial support. Beginning in 1903, he showed such pictures to acclaim in London and New York, stimulating a great demand for them. Sargent engineered his career so astutely that by 1907, when he pledged not to accept any more portrait commissions, he had established a solid reputation as a watercolourist.