John Singer Sargent
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.
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