John Singer Sargent
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.
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